Design methodolody for sustainability in everyday life

Purpose

How we live our lives, both privately and at work, has a major impact on both the planet and other people. It is therefore important to create preconditions for a sustainable everyday life. In recent years, designers have started to use models and methods from psychology and sociology to create designs that enable sustainability. Three different perspectives for understanding and designing for sustainability in everyday life are usually highlighted:

• Behavioural design – with a clear focus on specific behaviours, proven design strategies are used to encourage and facilitate behavioural change
• Activity-centred transformation – with an understanding of what people want to achieve, conditions are created for acting differently
• Practice-oriented design – starting from the habits and routines that people share, other ways of doing things are explored through experimental change processes.

With this service, we offer expert support and training to help you and your organisation understand, and create conditions for, a sustainable everyday with behavioural design, activity-centred transformation or practice-oriented design. As all three perspectives have different strengths in different contexts, we also help you understand which perspective is best suited to your organisation.

Method

If you need help with practical work to enable sustainability, we can support you in ongoing development work and in design processes, or by organising design sprints. We use  a design process that is divided into four main steps: concretising the challenge, exploring the challenge, creating design concept and evaluating design concept. In consultation, we decide whether you want help with all or part of the process. In addition, we help you choose the appropriate perspective for your challenge, for the type of solutions you want to create and for the resources available. Examples of activities where we can support you:

• User studies, such as observations and measurements in the field, interviews, surveys or creative exercises, both with qualitative and quantitative methods
• Analysis of data from user studies
• Design workshops where we generate ideas based on user insights
• Concept evaluations with users in a test environment or in the field.

If you want to develop your team's skills, we can offer courses to either give you a broad introduction to all three perspectives for understanding and designing for everyday sustainability, or to delve into the perspectives that are most relevant to you. All programmes consist of five two-hour sessions with a mix of lectures and group discussions. The introductory programme includes two general sessions and three sessions focusing on each perspective. The in-depth courses include one general session and four sessions focusing on each part of the design process: concretisation, exploration, creation and evaluation.

The book Sustainability through Everyday Designs, written by Anneli Selvefors and Sara Renström at RISE and Helena Strömberg at Chalmers University of Technology, is used as a basis for both practical design activities and training programmes. Read more about the book here

Delivery

Through this service, you and your organisation will gain knowledge about how you can work to create the conditions for a sustainable life, both in private and at work. You also get to know the design tools you can use in your process and an understanding of which tools can help you with what. If we have worked together practically with design activities, the delivery can also include:

• Summarised results and insights from user studies
• Ideas and design concepts that support sustainability in everyday life
• Evaluations of concepts that describe the potential for behavioural change and reduced environmental impact.

Other results can also be produced by RISE by agreement, for example  a visual overview,  a presentation, a report or similar.