System design for sustainability: the challenge of behaviour change

Abstract

Product-service system (PSS) innovations represent a promising approach to sustainability. However, the application of this model is still very limited because its implementation and diffusion requires changes to our consumption and production patterns, and behavioural changes at different levels, which have been hindered by several barriers. This chapter investigates four interlinked ideas, crucial nodes for such barriers, and proposes to overcome them via a set of working hypotheses for sustainable design. First, sustainable PSS are, in most cases, radical innovations that initially struggle to survive in the market; design plays an important part in the facilitation of the introduction, scaling-up and branching of a PSS-based solution. Second, the diffusion of sustainable PSS is linked to (among other factors) attractiveness, consumer acceptance and satisfaction with such alternatives, and this opens a debate on the need for an aesthetic of sustainable PSSs to enhance the specific characteristics and reveal the inner qualities of this new generation of artefacts. Third, the product-service system innovation business model has been mainly researched and implemented as eco-efficient opportunities within industrialized contexts; it is proposed here that a system innovation approach may act as a business opportunity, even in such contexts coupling eco-efficiency with socio-ethical sustainability, and this is favoured when they are characterized by being locally based and network-structured (i.e. system innovation as distributed economies). Finally, the lack of competencies in the worldwide design community in system design for sustainability points to the need for behavioural changes among design researchers, design educators and designers. To speed up the process of knowledge building and dissemination the design community needs to adopt a new attitude and approach of promoting all possible synergies and processes of learning-by-sharing, enabling effective knowledge-base and know-how sharing, osmosis and cross-fertilization in an open and copy-less ethos. These four hypotheses highlight new research frontiers extending the design role towards a system approach addressing, more specifically, the need for behavioural changes on different and interlinked levels.