On-pack date and storage labeling is one of the direct information carriers used by the food industry to communicate product shelf-life attributes to consumers. However, it is also one of the major factors that contribute to consumer food waste issues. This study aims to systematically understand the existing tensions within the current date and storage labeling system and explore the potential opportunities for design to intervene. First, we conducted a literature review to identify tensions that the consumer encounters in their food edibility assessment system and summarize the corresponding proposal for actions. 12 tensions and 16 proposals for action were identified and further framed according to a conceptual model developed in this study. Following this, the literature findings were refined and grounded in co-creation sessions in consumer workshops and industry practitioner interviews to develop specific labeling-related design implications. The findings indicate the importance of investigating the role that date and storage labeling play from a system level. Furthermore, we suggest that the conceptual model developed in this study can be used not only as a framework that guides researchers to identify and analyze labeling-related food waste problems that each individual consumer encounters, but also as a guideline that assists packaging design practitioners in exploring potential design opportunities to solve the problem from a system perspective.

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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.

The world keeps changing more rapidly. Induced by context change disruptions such as individual life-course changes and macro socio-economical events, the way people carry out their everyday life doings is also undergoing a dynamic transition process, which may open up windows of opportunity for design to transit people's behavior in a more sustainable direction. A successful behavior transition entails not only changing people's wrongdoings but also retaining the existing desired doings. However, over the last decade, the field of Design for Sustainable Everyday Life seems to have grown accustomed to the concept of change. The potential role that design may play in retaining people's existing sustainable doings has been ill-addressed. This dissertation aims to develop an activity-based theoretical approach to help design researchers and practitioners better understand how people transit behavior when they undergo context change disruptions, and further explore design implications informed by the sustainable behavior retention perspective. The study comprises two parts. In the first part, six explorative case studies were used to investigate the applicability of adopting activity theory (AT) as a theoretical lens for understanding context change-induced behavior transition phenomena. As a result, an ATbased framework was iterated, developed and validated. In the second part, by incorporating the proposed framework with the theoretical understanding generated from a prescriptive meta-synthesis study, an AT-informed toolkit prototype was developed and evaluated. Three key findings can be identified. First, at a conceptual level, the study reveals that the design for sustainable behavior retention perspective may complement the design for behavior change perspective by facilitating a bottom-up and context-focused relative approach to achieve sustainability. Second, at a design analytical level, three dimensions of AT: i). hierarchical structure, ii). long-term development and iii). reality-based contextual scales of analysis are especially useful for systematically analyzing the impacts of context change disruptions on people's everyday life doings. Third, at a design synthesis level, the ATinformed design toolkit prototype and the extracted design implications can provide a systemic view that helps designers take both sustainable behavior change and retention perspectives into early-stage design ideation. The contribution of the dissertation is two folds. First, it introduces the perspective of sustainable behavior retention into the field of Design for Sustainable Everyday Life. Second, it provides an activity-based theoretical framework as a potential lens for designers to better cope with context change disruptions.

The Design for Sustainable Everyday Life course aims to provide students with three theoretical lenses (behaviours, activities, and practices) to understand and develop design interventions that improve sustainability by impacting people's everyday doings. This paper reports on the result of and our reflections on the course over the past two years with a particular focus on identifying the challenges and benefits that the students faced in learning and employing the three different theoretical lenses in sustainable design. We found that facilitating students to apply theoretical lenses that are typically outside of their previous design education constitutes a challenging task in the course, let alone presenting students with three theoretical lenses on the topic of design for sustainable everyday life. However, results show that the three lenses supported students in choosing an appropriate unit of analysis and systematically developing sustainable design interventions at a target level. Moreover, the course also offered an entry point for students to (re)discover and align their existing understanding of design with new concepts introduced by the lenses. Furthermore, the analytical and design approach that the lenses advocate also enabled students to explore and experiment with different design intervention strategies to influence people's (un)sustainable daily doings.