Keywords

1 Introduction

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of Agenda ONU 2030 [1,2,3] represent fundamental drivers for decision-makers, local and central administrations, industries, and education. The SDG embrace social and environmental issues and summarize the main challenges of our time. The problems identified by the Agenda require deep and substantial transformations of processes, systems, services, and organizations. All social actors are asked to be part of the change: governments, industries, local administrations, and citizens.

To conciliate objectives aimed at environmental sustainability – including the contrast to climate change, clean energy, and better use of natural resources - with inclusion, social justice, and economic growth, the actors of each local context must develop and implement solutions apt to the specific characteristics of the territory [4].

In universities and academia, the adoption of the SDG has a high impact on research and education: the former should produce questions, knowledge, and solutions for sustainable development [5]; the second should disseminate research outcomes and train the new generations with skills and abilities consistent with the objectives of creating a more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable future. High education programs are among the primary agents for the strategic change of cultures and behaviors and to grow the capabilities required by sustainable transformation [6]. Academic papers investigate the strategies in academic disciplines for this purpose; they include cross-curricular approaches aimed at deep and extensive re-thinking of programs and their finalities, and stand-alone initiatives focused on specific topics [7]. Working for the SDG implies generating and implementing local and global solutions and developing transdisciplinary collaboration [8]; this asks for the broad involvement of all disciplines engaged in the design of systems and services. Literature reports that sustainability impacts not only the definition of disciplinary contents and methodologies but also organizations and education methodologies [9].

In university design programs, re-thinking education for sustainability requires updating contents to include complex and wicked problems and enhancing the attention toward ethics in projects, sense of critics, and understanding systems and processes. It also requires providing specific tools to express creativity and design-thinking for material and immaterial solutions [10, 11].

This paper contributes to updating design education for sustainability; it focuses on UX Design – User Experience Design - techniques and methodologies presently widely diffused in university education for services, interaction design, and other disciplinary fields [12, 13].

UX Design aims to understand the complex tangles of factors that compose people’s experiences while interacting with products, environments, services, applications, and systems [14]. Experience investigation includes all mind and body factors engaged in action and decision-making, such as sensory phenomena and perception; cultural and mental models; cognitive and emotional processes; personal attitudes and dispositions; physical ergonomic [15]. Education programs on UX Design include theories from cognitive psychology and social sciences. Furthermore, they provide methods and techniques to research users [16, 17].

The research presented in this paper inquires about the potential of including theories about Design for Behaviour Change (DfBC) in courses on UX Design in university education programs. DfBC favors the awareness in students of the complexity of enabling and promoting sustainable lifestyles and behaviors and offers specific knowledge apt to support the design of solutions addressed to the change of attitudes and behaviors.

2 The Role of Behavior Changes in Sustainable Development

The transformations required by the ONU Agenda 2030 also rely on the change of behaviors by all citizens. For example, we can focus on goals 7, Affordable and Clean Energy, and 13, Climate Action. Citizens can contribute to the goals by adopting suitable lifestyles and behaviors at the micro and macro scale; preferring sustainable transportation; avoiding wastes in lighting and thermal regulation; restoring buildings for sustainable thermal regulation; privileging low-consumption electrical appliances. These are only some possible examples of how individuals can impact energy consumption and climate change [18, 19]. On the other hand, the achievement of Goals 7 and 13 also impacts goals focused on social inclusion and justice since the availability of clean and affordable energy affects the opportunities to create economic development, health care and education services, sustainable urban environments [20].

Changes in behaviors should also play a fundamental role in developing more efficient and effective healthcare services (Goal 3); adopting convenient lifestyles has an essential impact on the efficacy of therapies and the prevention of several diseases. Despite the complexity of framing the real effects of behaviors on health in a general sense [21, 22], it is vastly recognized that lifestyles impact it. Improving the efficiency and efficacy of medical care and reducing diseases through prevention frees up resources and enables the creation of more inclusive services.

On the other hand, change is never easy, both at the micro and macro scale, and the engagement of citizens in the construction of desirable transition toward the future requires the capability of enacting diversified strategies aimed at eliciting motivation for sustainable lifestyles to enable the contribution of individuals and their adhesion to the objectives of the SDG through new narratives, sense-making, co-design and more [23]. Despite the availability of data, information, and scientific knowledge documenting the SDG’s necessity for the planet’s future and humanity, several factors hamper the active participation of citizens in the required transformation [24,25,26].

3 Expanding User Studies in Design for Sustainability

Researchers and design practitioners have resorted to knowledge from human and brain sciences. They have developed methods and techniques for investigating contexts to model human behaviors, needs, and attitudes and to optimize the design of products and systems coherently. Human-centered design mapping at the time includes hundreds of approaches and research references [27].

The development of the brain and social sciences and the availability of data and algorithms are favoring new design approaches focused on the experience with applications in various fields. The concept of Experience is among the primary reference for creating value in the design of products, services, and digital and hybrid solutions [28, 29]. Designing for experience requires modeling of needs, attitudes, expectations, and potential motivations of final users to learn how to create value for them [30].

The focus on experience in design responds to the contemporary attention on the meaningfulness of actions, interactions, and relationships beyond the material quality of artifacts [31]. While societal and industrial systems keep changing, design processes evolve and rely on a growing variety of scientific theories, such as on the knowledge by the collection and processing of data, and traditional and new techniques, such as ethnography and digital ethnography [32, 33]. Depending on the project goals and context, experience design requires understanding all main factors impacting behaviors and decisions; experience involves human perception and personal dispositions; motivations; cognitive and emotional thinking; and social and cultural factors.

The theories of DfBC represent a novel approach since they focus on the frictions – such as cognitive dissonances and bottlenecks, practical obstacles, conscious and non-conscious factors influencing decision and determination – preventing people from adopting and appropriate behaviors despite their will and awareness of its importance and benefic effects on individuals, communities, environments.

4 Theories on DfBC

According to the literature, DfBC is a promising approach for creating products and services to enable sustainable behaviors of individuals (for example, the adoption of lifestyles with positive impacts on physical and mental health) and communities (for example, the promotion of environmentally sustainable behavior in the field of mobility, nutrition, use of natural resources). Compared to other design approaches, DfBC addresses the complexity of human experience by identifying the contradictory dynamics between will, attention, and motivations. It recognizes their impact on behaviors and contextual factors that can modify the perception of situations and the individual decision processes [34, 35]. Following Lockton, DfBC differs from design for persuasion since the latter is focused on the change of attitudes and does not provide means to cope with the situation where the change of behavior does not imply a change of attitude. The authors argue that, even though design could always be for a change of behavior, in DfBC, the designer’s intent goes beyond that. In other words, DfBC can refer to the issues of usability, accessibility, and usability; still, it goes beyond since its focus is on the expected change, while the design of artifacts is a means to achieve the goal.

Several design approaches ascribe to the realm of DfBC [36, 37]. This paper reports the two primary references employed in the education experiment reported as a case study in the following paragraph of the document.

Wendel [38] focuses on design problems when the limits of human willpower and attention hinder behavior change. The authors also refer to the theories of the two winners of the Nobel prizes, Daniel Kahneman and the economist Richard H. Thaler. He focuses on all situations where automatic thinking and schemes of action guide the actions of people, driven by the human brain’s shortcuts to economize its resources when quick decisions are needed. Wendel proposes a design approach aimed at modeling the existing habits to act in the context of action introducing new clues orienting decisions and behaviors.

West and Michie [39] refer to the COM-B model and the PRIME theory of motivation as conceptual tools to frame the main processes playing a part in behavior change and to cope with the complexity of designing for this purpose. Following the authors, the PRIME theory recognizes the gap and contradictions between people’s general wants and needs and their actions since “at every moment we act in pursuit of what we most want or need at that moment.“. In each moment, what we do is guided by the mental schemes we use to interpret the specific local context we are now, filtered by our capabilities, motivation, and opportunities we see. The models include physical and psychological capabilities, reflective and automatic motivation factors, and physical and social opportunities. From the design point of view, the model provides a map of the different facets of the user experience that designers should consider while designing for a change of behaviors.

5 Case Study

During the academic year 2021–2022, an education experiment was performed to investigate the suitability of DfBC in university education. The theories of DfBC were introduced in a course on UX Design for the students of the MSc in Digital and Interaction Design at the Design School of Politecnico di Milano. The class included approximately sixty students working in teams. The students were asked to develop a concept of service or product/service aimed at behavior change coherently with the goals of the ONU Agenda 2030. The teams performed activities following a classical double-diamond design process. They identified a suitable focus, including reference topic and context; after that, they conducted preliminary desk and field research to collect insights on behaviors, mental models, and motivations before proceeding to the concept generation, development, prototyping, and tests.

The students developed original concepts for purposes containing a certain amount of novelty.

The topics included:

  • Emotional messaging assistant – an application aimed at offering means for better control of emotional communication to be used in mailing, instant messaging, and posting on social networks;

  • Compulsive shopping in fashion – an application to discourage the compulsive purchase of non-necessary items;

  • Digital well-being for pre-teens – a physical/digital solution to help teens in liming their daily use of smartphones;

  • Seasonal Eating – an educational and playful application to encourage families to buy seasonal and local veggies and fruits;

  • Reduce food waste – a digital system for youngsters living alone;

  • Attention span – a solution to help students concentrate during study hours and take control of their digital engagement;

  • Disposable products – a solution to reduce travelers’ use and consumption of disposable products.

The education program required the students to produce a personal logbook reporting their progress during the semester, including encountered difficulties and how they coped with them. The logbooks provided the means to analyze the potentials and criticalities of introducing DfBC in UX Design education.

The first impact with the theories of DfBC was not straightforward, and students recognized its complexity. Some reported a personal interest in DfBC also due to their past frustration for the incapability of adopting a specific change in some daily routine despite intentions and commitment; they reported amazement due to the novelty of such a brief, and for some, the challenge was inspiring. Other students also expressed their astonishment that it is not sufficient to produce information and good application and services to engage people in change, regardless of the efforts in communication. The development of this awareness is an interesting result from the point of view of raising critical thinking. Based on research to detect user needs and design opportunities, the human-centered design paradigm differs profoundly from DfBC regarding brief definition, focus, and goals.

Among the reflections reported by students, several were concerned about the ethical issues in applying DfBC. The distinction between design for persuasion and design for the change of behaviors appears foggy. Need for more profound research. On the other hand, co-design emerged as the right direction to devise solutions capable of embodying personal wills and control without implying persuasion and forcing individual freedom.

On the whole, introducing theories of DfBC appears valuable to enhance awareness, elicit new ways of framing design briefs, and fertilize the creative proposition of new services and systems.

6 Conclusions

The application of DfBC theories in a UX Design course in a MSc in Digital and Interaction Design program provides the means for the critical discussion of this approach and to identify elements of novelty and originality concerning the most diffused approaches for human-centered design. The case study shows the effectiveness of DfBC in education, despite the difficulties exhibited by some students in understanding the specific point of view adopted when working for a change of behaviors. The experiment demonstrated a growing necessity for more structured debate on the ethical issues in design for innovation, with a specific focus on the importance played nowadays in design by brain and social sciences.