Leveraging realities of saving energy at home: Contributions of co-design to behavioural interventions

Abstract

While reducing individual energy consumption contributes to climate change mitigation, many individuals who share this belief fail to act on it. While behavioural interventions try to address such intention-behaviour gaps, few approaches have worked with consumers to understand the realities of their opportunities and limitations to save energy at home. We argue that co-design is well-suited to address the unique challenges of climate-relevant behaviour change and propose an abductive co-design methodology to develop a behavioural intervention with household members based on the Model of Action Phases (MAP) framework. We implement the methodology to design an energy savings app and behaviour change intervention in Switzerland. The methodology shifts participants into an expert role and elucidates their motivations, real-life challenges, and knowledge gaps to save energy. Through group problem-solving and self-reflection, participants provided design inputs which address the socio-psychological gaps to progress behaviour through the preaction, action and postaction phases of the MAP. We assess the originality and feasibility of the co-design inputs, as well as reflect on the experience of the researchers and participants during the process. We conclude that co-design provided novel inputs relevant for progressing through the behaviour change stages identified by the MAP framework.