Awareness, Change and Action
Mindset and Behaviour change
Before studying for my master’s degree, I never thought that I cared about environmental sustainability. I used to think that talking about sustainability is clichés and artificial behaviour. Following European mainstream ideas to talk about glaciers and rainforests, this noble moral appeal is too far away from my own life in East Asia. Due to climate change, the average temperature continues to rise. In Taiwan, the temperature in summer can reach 35 degrees Celsius, and this situation has become normal in the past decade. People have to stay in air-conditioned offices or classrooms to be able to work. Whenever a student wants to turn on the air conditioner, there is always a voice saying, “Wow, think about the poor polar bear!” Then another voice responds: “Sorry, the polar bear. But the weather is so hot. Let me turn on the air conditioner.”
Compared to our parents, we are a generation with a great sense of sustainability. Everyone in the class has watched Gore’s documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. All Taiwanese know the steps of resource recycling or energy saving. Every design assignment in the semester will always be environmentally friendly, whether it is for material changes or structural design. It was like a joke that keeps crying wolf, shouting for too long, everyone began too carelessly. Trivial days are still to be lived, work pressures and deadlines are still to be dealt with. Everyone becomes inattentive, and the concept of sustainability is like a misty flag hanging on the roof every morning, while people stay indoors indifferently.
As Madeleine Genzsch mentioned in her TED Talk, people’s attention is distracted by heavy work, but at the same time, they are manipulated by various advertisements and mainstream messages. Those decisions we thought made by ourselves are influenced by others in the information flow. Why are our worries and anger in the face of climate change not as strong as we see other social injustices?
Free will and Manipulation
In his book, Less is more: how degrowth will save the world, Hickel mentioned that people are trapped in the rules of capitalism and the growth index. This perception forced us to follow the existing economy game rules and to continuously increase income and GDP. People have no chance to examine what is needed by themself and the environment. This is like a cycle of continuous production and consumption. People are fueled by planned obsolescence and advertising. In the trap of consumerism, endless internal consumption of environmental resources and mental energy. Before I became a service designer, I was designing digital products in a large e-commerce company. I knew the tricks of marketing and design. To allow users to continue to use products and consumption, which is the adhesion data we pursue every season. We carried out many addictive mechanisms in the design process. In the book, Hooked, this process is made into a clear model, which is regarded as a standard by product designers.
Looking back, I almost feel like a pessimist who believes the world works like this forever. People either follow the social rules of the economy game or be blocked from success. Until I left the business industry and started my master’s studies, I did not expect that the relationship between humans and the environment would be the core of my course. Frankly speaking, I felt uncomfortable and repelled at first, and almost had a rebellious mentality before starting the unit. However, when I separated my subjective consciousness from my professional learning goals, I found that I had changed. As my knowledge of related fields increases, my behaviour in the subconscious has also changed.
In the WOW project, to make people aware of energy consumption at home, my team designed a series of workshops to guide people to use home appliances. To conduct user tests, I must be a demonstration of my roommates and practice energy-saving behaviours. After this unit, I still maintain the same habits. In Design Future, the group discussed the impact of traffic and carbon emissions on the environment, and I became accustomed to walking to reach the destination. In the five-month global student service design competition, the team studied women’s menstrual products and eco-friendly solutions on the market. I had been using disposable products for a long time, but I bought sustainable products after the research.
I am not an environmentalist, but in this whole year of hypnosis, I almost reflexively take sustainable behaviour. After that, I realized that people’s behaviour can be changed by various guidelines, whether active or passive, so why do consumer behaviours still follow the framework of capitalism?
External system and Nudge
The difference between service design and other design disciplines is that we use strategy and system as the starting point for finding problems. When we look at consumer behaviour from a macro perspective, we will find that information, stakeholders, industries, and communities influence consumer decisions. From a sociological point of view, human beings are not individuals. We live in the communities to which we belong and gain a sense of belonging through connection and consensus. People in society cannot be withdrawn from the system and will naturally be affected by the situation they belong to. Humans are social animals. We often affect each other. (Thaler, R.H., 2008.) We observe the behaviours of people similar to us in society, imitate these behaviours, and develop our sense of identity with the community. However, in the book, Nudge, the author also mentioned a key element that we usually do not directly see the behaviour of other people but through inference. Therefore, it is often affected by our personal cognitive biases and risk assessments.
As service designers, we often switch cognition differently from a bird’s-eye view and a micro perspective. Human psychology and consumer behaviour firmly grasp my attention. Due to the difference in information media, the actions presented are rich in level. My main project has the opportunity to cooperate with Decathlon UK, using their physical stores as an entry point to discover the influence of sustainable behaviour in local communities and whether people’s environmental awareness can be changed through consumer participation.
In Basis Research’s sustainability playbook (2019), a survey shows that people’s willingness to purchase green products will increase with concern for sustainability. At the same time, some reports pointed out that when people realize and believe that environmental problems exist and are capable of making changes through consumer behaviour, they will transform their intentions into actual actions.
But people’s psychological activities are complex. As consumers, we are calculating the costs all the time. Like the green premium, we are all evaluating the benefits of buying these green products to our lives and the environment. (Gates, B. 2020.)
People have suffered countless pressures in their daily lives. There are infinitely many factors to be considered behind the purchase behaviour alone, including convenience, utility, desirability, social pressure, cost. (Hereward, F., 2020.) Even so, for now, we have to consider environmental sustainability. For companies and brands, it is difficult to ask consumers to abandon purchasing behaviour because of environmental protection. It is better to let sustainable products enter people’s reach, carry out discrete sustainable behaviours in their life, and improve participation in the community. The research provides a perpetual cycle that strengthens cognition, through behaviour to increase people’s belief in sustainability.
When I was researching this issue, there was still a vague voice in my mind questioning whether sustainable consumption is another tactic of consumerism. Would it be another trick that only changed its name and manipulated people’s beliefs of the masses with unproven trends? I have not yet made a clear decision, and this will be the answer I am looking for in the next five months of research.
And then, this developed into my research question: How to enhance sustainability awareness with user engagement?
Start the research: Methodology
Enterprise design thinking
The schedule of this five-month project will be divided into two parts. The first part is the internship at the Decathlon office during the summer vacation from June to September, focusing on the development of Decathlon-based design projects. The second part is the reflection stage from the end of the internship in September to November. This stage will be used to summarize the sustainable consciousness service model applied to the retail industry.
In the past, I have always followed the double diamond model from the design council as my design methodology. This model regulates the task that should be completed at each stage and completes the goals of design thinking and prototype output between convergence and divergence. However, in this research, I expect to adopt a different design method to verify the process. This project is not just a personal research topic. It overlaps with the internship at Decathlon in terms of schedule. In addition to completing the sustainable design tasks assigned by the Decathlon design team during the internship, it is also a channel for accumulating user data.
This project is not complete academic research but covers corporate implementation. Decathlon’s brand positioning and product decisions have to be considered in the design progress. Since the double diamond process takes a long time to complete a cycle, I will use the enterprise design thinking from IBM and combine it with agile development steps to complete this research. The difference from the double-diamond process is that corporate design thinking focuses on three steps, covering a one-time design process with observation, reflection and production, and incorporating tool modules for team building and user engagement from the perspective of the enterprise. Designers not only aim to conduct user research and complete design output but also pay attention to the cooperation and coordination between the company’s business model and evaluate the role of stakeholders.
“We think the systems of the world should work in service of people. At the heart of our human-centered mission is Enterprise Design Thinking: a framework to solve our users’ problems at the speed and scale of the modern enterprise.” (IBM,2021)
Service design has always been regarded as a multidisciplinary field, and the research methods we used have covered psychology, anthropology and sociology. However, for me, service design is also another process of developing new methodologies. We find the problem and provide solutions that can be applied in the industry.
Present and Future
In this study of sustainable consumer behaviour change, I took Decathlon as the object of cooperation and the field of project research as the starting point. I hope that after the internship stage, I can develop a service framework that is more widely used in the retail industry and the British community.
Inevitably, although this research topic is based on environmental sustainability, I have to understand the brand’s business model and consumer behaviour. I learned about the Three Horizons model in my previous studies. This model divides the innovation stage of an enterprise into three stages and the process of transformation.
It helps groups explore systemic patterns to identify which of the dominant patterns are no longer fit for purpose, how the emerging trends can shape the future, and what visionary action is needed to collectively move us towards a viable future. (H3Uni.org , 2021.)
The future and innovation sound very abstract to companies and users at first glance, but the value of design lies in creating possibilities and appears as one of those elementary practices in which human beings experience not yet existing things. (Koskinen, I., 2012.)
Sociality and Community
People are social animals. In this research, what is targeted is not only the purchasing behaviour of individuals but how to influence each other through the power of the group.
people listen to other people, influence them, pay attention to things others see as important, and mold their opinions on things like ethics based on these social influences.(Koskinen, I., 2012.)
As service designers, we not only consider the roles of different stakeholders in the system but also link the identities and emotions between people. We empower people so that they can speak for themselves and make choices that are more suitable for them and the environment in which they live.
References
Basis Research.(2019) Sustainability playbook. [Online] Available at: https://www.basisresearch.com/sustainability [Assessed on 14 June 2021]
Design Council. (2019) What is the framework for innovation? Design Council’s evolved Double Diamond. [Online] Available at: https://www.designcouncil.org.uk/news-opinion/what-framework-innovation-design-councils-evolved-double-diamond [Assessed on 14 June 2021]
Eyal, N. (2013) Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products. Penguin Books.
Gates, B.(2020) Gatesnotes.[Online] Introducing the Green Premiums. Available at: https://www.gatesnotes.com/Energy/Introducing-the-Green-Premiums [Assessed on 13 June 2021]
Genzsch, M. (2019) TED Talk [Online] Empowering sustainable behaviour. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoEh1Dg2vJA [Assessed on 10 June 2021]
Hereward, F. (2020) Research world[Online]. How should brands adapt to consumers’ complex and contradictory sustainability behaviour?. Available at: https://www.researchworld.com/sustainable-behaviour-change/ [Accessed: 13 June 2021]
Hickel, J. (2020) Less is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World.William Heinemann.
H3Uni.org. (2021) Three Horizons.[Online] Available at: https://www.h3uni.org/practices/foresight-three-horizons/ [Accessed: 13 June 2021]
IBM (2021) Enterprise Design Thinking.[Online] Available at: https://www.ibm.com/design/thinking/ [Assessed on 6 June 2021]
Koskinen, I.(2012) Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.
Richard H.&Cass R. (2008) Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Penguin Books.
