Communicating Sustainable Shoes to Mainstream Consumers: The Impact of Advertisement Design on Buying Intention

Traditionally, marketing of sustainable products addresses green buyers, thus missing out on the mainstream consumers and volume necessary to cover the potentially higher cost of more sustainable materials. However, how to effectively communicate more sustainable products to mainstream consumers and to increase their buying intention is still...

Consumers’ perception of relatedness in mental representations of products

The work in this thesis investigates relatedness (as perceived by consumers) in mental representations of products. Just as other objects that are part of the physical world, products are represented in consumers’ minds in the form of concepts. Concepts hold consumers’ knowledge about a product. They consist of sets of features (concrete and...

Forming a method mindset: The role of knowledge and preference in facilitating heuristic method usage in design

Both systematic and heuristic methods are common practice when designing. Yet, in teaching students how to design, heuristic methods are typically only granted a secondary role. So, how do designers and students develop a mindset for using heuristic methods? In this paper, we study how prior knowledge (about heuristic methods and their usage)...

The use of systematic and heuristic methods in the basic design cycle: A comparative survey of students' method usage

In the present paper, we study the reported use of systematic and heuristic methods for 304 students enrolled in a master-level course on design theory and methodology. What to teach design and engineering students about methods is an important topic for discussion. One reason for this is that the experiences of design educators when using...

Forming a mindset: Design students' preconceptions about the usefulness of systematic methods

Teaching students to use systematic design methods effectively is not straightforward. While method teaching often focuses on the procedural aspects of method usage (e.g., what steps to take and in what order), effectively using a systematic method entails more than following its ‘instructions’. As noted by Andreasen [1], students need to be...

The ambiguous role of methods in design education: Initial findings from the Delft method study

Extending the Implicit Association Test (IAT): Assessing Consumer Attitudes Based on Multi-Dimensional Implicit Associations

Background: The authors present a procedural extension of the popular Implicit Association Test (IAT; [1]) that allows for indirect measurement of attitudes on multiple dimensions (e.g., safe–unsafe; young–old; innovative–conventional, etc.) rather than on a single evaluative dimension only (e.g., good–bad). Methodology/Principal Findings: In...