Abstract
The current and future challenges of sustainable development require a massive transformation of habits and behaviors in the whole society at many levels. This demands a change of perspectives, priorities, and practices that can only result from the development of more aware, informed, and instructed communities and individuals. The field of design for sustainable behavior is answering this need through the development of products, systems, and services to support the change of people’s habits and decision-making processes. In this regard, Virtual Reality (VR) is a promising tool: it has already been explored to drive sustainable behavior change in several situations, through a wide range of devices, technologies, and modalities. This variety provides uncountable opportunities to designers, but it comes with a series of ethical, psychological, and technical questions. Hence, VR developers should be able to distinguish and identify possible strategies, delivering suitable solutions for each case study. In this work, we present a framework for the development of VR experiences to support sustainable behavior change, based on a systematic review. We consider the various features to manage and possible alternatives when creating a VR experience, linking them to the behavioral aspects that can be addressed according to the project’s aim. The framework will provide designers with a tool to explore and orient themselves towards possible sets of optimal choices generating tailored solutions.
Highlights
Sustainability issues are one of our times’ main concerns and include a complex set of interconnected environmental, social, and economic problems
An example is the one presented by Tang and Bahmra, who related different phases in behavior change to a variable control of decisions that can switch from user to product [29]
Virtual Reality (VR) experiences for sustainable behavior are designed with a specific educational purpose, such as serious games [37]; the element we see in the center of Figure 1 is the aim of the experience
Summary
Sustainability issues are one of our times’ main concerns and include a complex set of interconnected environmental, social, and economic problems. Sustainability 2021, 13, 943 possibility of diversifying experiences depending on the user and learning styles can be a great advantage in education [16] This potential represents a criticality when making design decisions and orienting towards a set of choices rather than others. A strategy is to embed games into products and systems, to engage and motivate users [20] Mentioning these possibilities, spontaneous question are: Why use a virtual space, when it is possible to change people’s behavior in real life directly? As discussed in our previous work [21], VR can uniquely impact on human behavior and decision making in five ways: These possibilities will be available for an impressive number of users.
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