Developing A Behavioral Model for Designers to Encourage Sustainable Consumption

Abstract

Industrial design has played an influential role in developing consumerist culture. Given the design's potentialfor the growth of sustainable thinking, altering this direction is expected from design. Despite the increasingrecognition that mainstream design has unintended consequences, less attention is paid to consumer behavior as theunderlying cause of unsustainability, especially the impact of purchasing new products. By considering psychologyalongside design discipline, behavioral models provide a practical foundation to change behavior, and their use insustainable design is growing. Due to the narrow focus on purchasing, maintaining, and disposing of products, thisresearch aims to design a behavioral model in this area. In this regard, by studying literature in the field of psychology,behavioral components and ways to affect them were extracted, and known models for behavior change were reviewed.These findings were reanalyzed and utilized with sustainable design principles and evolutionary psychology to design amodel with design interventions to change consumption patterns. Designers can use this model to encourage sustainableconsumption. This is significant because the previous research only focused on reducing resource consumption andpromoting environmentally friendly behavior in their models.