Behaviours, Practices, Activities, Doings: Making Them Sustainable Through Design

Abstract

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.