Circular design nexus: Converging Sustainable Product development, User Behavior, and Environmental Impact

Research Project, 2024 – 2025

In this project, we aim to understand the need for new capabilities and tools for how product development teams in companies will be able to anticipate users’ behavior from a sustainability perspective when the product is managed in a circular manner, and thereby be able to steer users’ behavior in a more sustainable direction. This project will generate knowledge that can be integrated in design and product development guidelines and decision-support tools for product development teams. In this pre-project we will also conduct literature reviews, and state-of-practice studies to clarify our preliminary research questions:

1. In which ways is a behavioral change perspective included in current sustainable design methods and tools? 2. How are, and how can, product-developing companies be supported in understanding their products’ roles in people’s everyday lives and the sustainability related behaviors? 3. How are, and how can, product-developing companies be supported in assessing the resource efficiency and environmental impact of user behaviors? 4. In which ways can product-developing companies be supported in designing products that enable more sustainable user behaviors?

The project has funding from the research and innovation program Design for energy-efficient everyday life, which is run by the Energy Agency and coordinated by SVID, the Swedish Industrial Design Foundation.