Forming the face of green products: Mood boards and early consumer involvement in ship interior design

Forming the face of green products: Mood boards and early consumer involvement in ship interior design

Murto, P.
Ahola, M.
Person, F.E.O.K.

Industrial Design Engineering

Product Innovation Management

2013-06-23

In this paper, we study mood boards and the process by which they can be used to understand consumer inferences about environmental sustainability in the early stages of green product development. As a component of a research project on sustainable ship design, we created mood boards showcasing three ship interior concepts. In simulating the interior design process for a ship, the mood boards displayed three different principles for environmentally sustainable design. Next, we used the mood boards in 14 interviews to elicit information about how consumers infer environmental sustainability from design. The results suggest that mood boards can be used to elicit a range of inferences about environmental sustainability. The inferences raised in our study are well in line with principles for sustainable design suggested in the literature. However, the results also suggest the inferences consumers make about environmental sustainability can differ widely. In addition, the comparative assessment of the mood boards in the interviews often resulted in “spill over” effects. Based on these results, we discuss how the use of mood boards can be adapted to better account for variance in how consumers infer beliefs about sustainability from visual material.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:efb24270-d7d7-40bc-b9d5-8f84bcb0e053

IPDMC 2013: 20th International Product Development Management Conference, Paris, France, 23-25 June 2013

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2013 The Author(s)