Design as a product care enabler

Abstract

The relevance of persuasion for product care. Aiming at increasing users’ interest in sustainable consumption, different lines of research and initiatives ranging from frameworks for design to community-based approaches, have presented routes to support a transition from a linear economy to a circular economy. These models intend to extend the performance of products through its lifetime as a means to reduce the environmental drawbacks of excessive consumption. Product care focuses on the immediate actions consumers can conduct to maintain products in sound condition. Persuasive strategies and techniques can provide product care with an additional source of motivation drivers while engaging consumers with care activities. The project. Current research in design for product care has addressed different strategies and possibilities while promoting care behaviour, which requires consumers to be active and willing to perform maintenance and repair regularly.  These strategies and methods have been useful to explore the inner drivers of consumers and undercover influential factors that make people act in a certain way. Aiming at further exploring these relations between users and products, this project addresses the influence of cultural background on care, by focusing on human behaviour to design a persuasive system to make people care more. The research. A cross-cultural study was conducted including three different countries, Austria, The Netherlands, and Colombia, aiming at exploring the influential drivers of care. The sample consisted of 160 participants from different backgrounds who took part in a set of questionnaires and interviews to identify the specific context of product care. The findings from the research study were used to design a persuasive strategy which includes a phased-implementation. Former research has addressed cultural differences in fields such as marketing and design, but since the studies are mainly focused on marketing strategies, this research extended the scope towards persuasive strategies to influence people to act upon care. Psychology behavioural economics and design strategies. Different lines of research have studied human behaviour as a means to tailor propositions that are relevant to the target audience, and use the factors that influence the decision-making process, to present framed content which is aligned to the individuals’ interest and mindset orientation models, while convincing patients to carry on scanning procedures, or consumers to buy offers that include products which were not needed at the beginning of the consideration phase. This relates to the cognitive interest that people have concerning certain activity, product, or topic, which if high can lead them to make conscious decisions and reduce the external influence while making a choice. Behavioural economics aims at understanding the reasoning behind consumers acts, which can be shaped by the context and former experiences. The intention an individual has when setting and attaining a particular goal has been a focus of research through the time, since people say they want to commit to a certain activity such as exercising, but their actual performance falls short to reach that goal. Persuasion in design. Regarding research in design, the interaction between people and products has been addressed identifying factors that influence users’ behaviour, such as product attachment and the actual interaction with products which can lead consumers’ actions in multiple manners. Understanding the intention of our propositions can be of help while designing products, services, and spaces that can make people act accordingly.  A guideline for tailoring a persuasive system to convince people to care more was designed in this project. The persuasive strategy. This project resulted in a persuasive system composed of two elements which are as follows and APP and a website are presented, together with initial lines of a service proposition which can be the result of the phased-implementation strategy. The app and the website were designed following a set of guidelines resulting from the cross-cultural study, and the current literature in the overarching fields that set the foundation of this project. The persuasive system was tested in two different iterations with designers and experts from other areas. To devise the impact of this system, it is necessary to extend the intervention in the future by introducing the means presented in a formal setting to validate the long-term impact and how the intervention can be relevant to the users.