Sustainable printing for the Chinese consumer market

Sustainable printing for the Chinese consumer market

Yau, K.H.

Van Heur, R.J.H.G. (mentor)
Van Boeijen, A.G.C. (mentor)
Zou, Z.D. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

2010-12-16

Worldwide, consumers demand companies to take more responsibility for what environmental problems their products might cause. Companies are following this demand from consumers by producing more sustainable products. HP forms no exception and has implemented so called “Eco solutions” to reduce the environmental impact of their consumer inkjet printers. These eco solutions do not seem to work very well in China as the solutions that HP implemented are developed for a global market and are too generic. This graduation project reports on what Chinese users think of as sustainable and what motivates Chinese users to be more sustainable. The gathered insights have resulted in sustainable solutions that better fit the Chinese market. User research showed that there is a preference towards “green” products in China. However this preference is not based on intrinsic motivation of users to reduce the impact on the environment, but rather on the trendy image these products currently have in China. To raise more awareness about sustainability, green products have to communicate what benefits it directly offers the users, such as saving costs. Compared to the western world there is not only a different motivation to buy more sustainable products, there is also a different infrastructure. Extensive corporate recycling programs that work well in the West, might not always be as effective in China. This is due to the lack of infrastructure and due to the lack of proper law and regulations on recycling. Four different design directions, to reduce the environmental impact of printers, have been developed to fit specifically into the context of the Chinese consumer market. During this project, one of the four design directions has been further developed to be implemented into upcoming printers of HP. The design direction “Eco-feedback” has resulted in the concept of “Greenify”. Greenify is a software application on multiple platforms, that motivates users to change their behavior and raises more awareness about sustainability by tracking their behavior and giving feedback on it. Users indicate in evaluations that the ease of use of Greenify triggers them to print in a more sustainable way. They also indicate that the feedback raises more awareness towards sustainability and shows them that more sustainable printing benefits them directly by saving costs on printing. For this project to continue HP needs to develop a full working prototype in order to evaluate the design with users over a longer period of time. This will give more insight into how much Greenify influences user behavior and what the exact benefits for the environment are.

China
printing
behavior
feedback

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:fc03f4ff-660e-4bab-ac79-4505c549c804

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2010 Yau, K.H.