Abstract
Abstract Over the past decade, the field of design for sustainable behaviour (DfSB) has gained a growing amount of research interest. However, as the field evolves, new challenges also arise. A suitable unit of analysis is needed to contextualize users’ behaviour issues in a broader socio-cultural and long-term perspective. This paper explores the use of activity theory (AT) as a potential lens for guiding empirical analysis and design exploration in DfSB. By employing a meta-synthesis approach, we systematically search and synthesize existing studies that adopted AT in design for sustainability. Key findings show that AT’s principles and theoretical implications are especially useful for helping design researchers frame and address DfSB challenges. We argue that by taking activity as the unit of analysis, the AT lens can enable researchers to incorporate users’ dynamic, multi-level and complex activity systems into DfSB considerations.
Highlights
Design for sustainability is a design process and resulting product that incorporates the environmental, social and economic sustainability concerns into product design and development (Crul, Diehl & Ryan 2009)
Building upon the meta-synthesis results presented above, in the discussion part, first, we summarize the key insights extracted from the results to answer the RQ1: how have activity theory (AT) and its theoretical principles been applied in existing studies to guide the empirical analysis and design explorations for tackling design-related sustainability challenges? After that, we focus on synthesizing AT-based theoretical and practice-relevant design implications to address the RQ2: how might the findings be translated to theoretical and practice-relevant implications for design researchers in the design for sustainable behaviour (DfSB) field to apply?
This paper explores the use of AT as a potential lens for guiding empirical analysis and design explorations in DfSB studies
Summary
Design for sustainability is a design process and resulting product that incorporates the environmental, social and economic sustainability concerns into product design and development (Crul, Diehl & Ryan 2009). It is an umbrella concept that comprises a variety of sub-fields, including sustainable design at the product level (e.g., green design and EcoDesign), product-service system level (e.g., sustainable product and service system design), spatial-social innovation level (e.g., design for social innovation) and socio-technical innovation system level (e.g., design for system innovations and transitions) (Ceschin & Gaziulusoy 2016). The field of design for sustainability has witnessed a significant shift of research focus from technical-centric and product-oriented design to socio-technical centric and people-oriented design (Ceschin & Gaziulusoy 2016).
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