A Practice Oriented Approach to User Centered Sustainable Design

A Practice Oriented Approach to User Centered Sustainable Design

Kuijer, L.
De Jong, A.M.

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

2009-12-06

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.

bathing
co-design
household resource consumption
practice theory
radical innovation

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:459e832a-720f-4e56-875b-25b6f6c63485

The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers

9784888981927

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

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2009 Kuijer, L. ; De Jong, A.M. ; The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers