A Practice Oriented Approach to User Centered Sustainable Design

Conference paper (2009)
Department
Industrial Design (IDE) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2009 Kuijer, L. ; De Jong, A.M. ; The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Co-design Practice theory Radical innovation Bathing Household resource consumption
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Published Date

06-12-2009

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Source:

Proceedings of the 6th International Symposium on Environmentally Conscious Design and Inverse Manufacturing, 7-9 December 2009, Sapporo, Japan

ISBN:

9784888981927

Faculty

Industrial Design Engineering

Department

Industrial Design

Abstract

This paper describes a method for insight generation for sustainable innovations. The method takes a practice oriented approach aiming for product ideas for practice level innovations. The method was applied in a case study on the practice of bathing. Insights on sustainable bathing innovations were gathered during a two-week period in which sixteen participants were asked to create and execute their own experiment for less resource intensive ways of bathing at home. In a group session these insights were translated into product ideas. It was concluded that it is indeed possible to generate product ideas with a practice oriented approach. The experiments in the home context helped the participants to come up with practice level bathing innovations. As predicted, they turned out to have potential to yield strong reductions in resource consumption and compete with the currently dominant practice of daily showering.