Models of the user: designers' perspectives on influencing sustainable behaviour

Abstract

Influencing more environmentally friendly and sustainable behaviour is a current focus of many projects, ranging from government social marketing campaigns, education and tax structures to designers' work on interactive products, services and environments. There is a wide variety of techniques and methods used, intended to work via different sets of cognitive and environmental principles. These approaches make different assumptions about 'what people are like': how users will respond to behavioural interventions, and why, and in the process reveal some of the assumptions that designers and other stakeholders, such as clients commissioning a project, make about human nature. This paper discusses three simple models of user behaviour -the pinball, the shortcut and the thoughtful -which emerge from user experience designers' statements about users while focused on designing for behaviour change. The models are characterised using systems terminology and the application of each model to design for sustainable behaviour is examined via a series of examples.Keywords: behaviour; sustainability; modelling; designers; patterns. David Harrison is Professor of Design Research at Brunel University, andLecturer in Sustainable Design and Environmentally Sensitive Design, specialising in sustainable design, innovative approaches to electronic manufacturing and printed electronics, via the Cleaner Electronics Research Group, which works on a range of environmentally sensitive design research. He worked for six years at the BBC as an Engineer, Researcher, Director and Assistant Producer, mainly on the BBC Computer Literacy Project. He also lectured in robotics for five years at the University of Portsmouth, and joined Brunel University as a Lecturer in Design in 1994.Neville A. Stanton holds the Chair of Human Factors in Transport at the University of Southampton. He has written and edited over a dozen books and a hundred peer-reviewed journal papers on applications of human factors and ergonomics, and has helped organisations design new human-machine interfaces. Other work covers human reliability in high risk systems, evaluation of control room interfaces, work design, social organisation and environment, and product design. His research interests include situation awareness, task analysis, cognitive work analysis, human error, socio-technical systems, naturalistic decision making and human reactions in emergencies.This paper is a revised and expanded version of a paper entitled 'Modelling the User: How design for sustainable behaviour can reveal different stakeholder perspectives on human nature', presented at 14th European Roundtable on Sustainable Consumption and Production (ERSCP) conference, Delft, The Netherlands, October 2010.

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