Design for Supporting Sustainable Behaviour
Retention through Context Change
Wanjun Chu and Renee Wever
The self-archived postprint version of this journal article is available at Linköping University Institutional Repository (DiVA):
http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-141992 N.B.: When citing this work, cite the original publication.
Chu, W., Wever, R., (2017), Design for Supporting Sustainable Behaviour Retention through Context Change, Persuasive Technology: Development and implementation of personalized technologies to
change attitudes and behaviours: 12th International Conference, PERSUASIVE 2017, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, April 4-6, 2017 Adjunct Proceedings, p. 72-73.
Original publication available at:
Copyright of the complete adjunct proceedings is held by the Centre for eHealth & Wellbeing Research, Department of Psychology, Health and Technology, University of Twente, The Netherlands. Copyright of individual contributions is held by the author(s).
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Doctoral Consortium Papers
Design for Supporting Sustainable Behaviour Retention through Context Change Wanjun Chu & Renee Wever
Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Sweden ✉ {chu.wanjun, renee.wever}@liu.se
Background and Research Questions
The socio-economic transitions in developing countries and emerging economics have led to context changes in almost every aspect of individuals’ life, resulting in undesired behaviour shifts from subsistence to consumption, such as from public transportation to private
automobile, from energy and food conservation to waste. Retaining people’s existing
sustainable consumption behaviour through the transition process into the new lifestyle is of crucial urgency for these countries to leapfrog towards a sustainable future [1]. The habit discontinuity hypothesis points toward context of life course changes as a moment where the existing habits of individuals become disrupted [2,3]. While context change can open up a window to break certain undesired behaviour, the existing desired behaviour also can be disrupted and its retention may be supported through interventions as well. Therefore, context change can be seen as a challenge and a promising opportunity to persuade people to retain sustainable consumption behaviour before unsustainable behaviour become embedded in daily life.
However, as most of the existing studies in the field of Persuasive Technology have focused in generating design knowledge and strategies to support desired behaviour change in given contexts, there has so far been little attention to study how to persuade people to retain their existing sustainable consumption behaviour through context change, especially for
implementing design interventions in developing countries. This study takes the aim above and is broken down into two research stages:
Stage 1: To understand why people retain some behaviours and change others through context change.
• What are the relevant theoretical perspectives to understand behaviour retention through context change?
• Given the theoretical background, what are the individual and contextual factors that affect behaviour retention? And how can these factors inform the design?
Stage 2: To explore how to design product and service to support users in retaining sustainable behaviour and outcome through context change.
• What are the design interventions and where to introduce these interventions to support sustainable behaviour retention? How to incorporate them into product and service design process?
Research Plan and Current State
First, in order to identify the individual and contextual factors that affect behaviour retention, a theoretical framework will be developed by reviewing literatures related to persuasive technology and behaviour transition from both psychology per-spective and social-practice perspective. Then, I intend to collect qualitative data by applying the theoretical framework to an Ethnographic Informed Design approach [4]. A pilot study about food consumption when international students move to Sweden, and case studies concerning behaviour patterns of Swedish households after residen-tial relocation will be conducted. Next, to implement and evaluate the persuasive design interventions, Research through Design method will be applied. I plan to focus on studying consumption behaviour of the emerging urban middle class in China with a specific interest in the domain of household
Adjunct Proceedings of the
12th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, April 3-6, 2017, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Copyright held by the authors.
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energy use. An initial idea is to design, develop and evaluate an interactive service application in users’ mobile devices, which aims to support sustainable energy consumption behaviour retention regarding the use of household appliances. The research plan is illustrated as the figure below.
Fig. 1. An overall view of the research plan.
Currently, I am in the initial stage of research building the theoretical foundation and pilot study. At the time of the Doctoral Consortium, I expect to have the pilot study ready to illustrate my research. The study is expected to inform design opportu-nities and practices to support people who are going through context change to retain their sustainable consumption behaviour. It could possibly lead to a future discussion of how to adjust and apply behaviour design and persuasive strategies to solve a given sustainability problem in different social and cultural contexts.
References
1. de Koning, J. I., Ta, T. H., Crul, M. R., Wever, R., & Brezet, J. C. (2016). GetGreen Vi-etnam: towards more sustainable behaviour among the urban middle class. Journal of Cleaner Production.
2. Verplanken, B., & Roy, D. (2016). Empowering interventions to promote sustainable life-styles: Testing the habit discontinuity hypothesis in a field experiment. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 45, 127-134. 3. Thomas, G. O., Poortinga, W., & Sautkina, E. (2016). Habit discontinuity, self-activation, and the
diminishing influence of context change: Evidence from the UK understanding society survey. PloS one, 11(4), e0153490
4. Blomberg, J., & Burrell, M. (2009). An ethnographic approach to design. Human-Computer Interaction, 71-94.
Adjunct Proceedings of the
12th International Conference on Persuasive Technology, April 3-6, 2017, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Copyright held by the authors.
