ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces design for sustainable behaviour and discusses its main sustainability benefits, limitations and unresolved issues, as well as its current and future research directions. This design approach deals with triggering shifts in the everyday behaviour of people in order to support the adoption of sustainable innovations, attitudes and behaviours. The scope of intervention includes products and, more broadly, systems of products and services, digital artefacts, the built environment and even policies. A wide range of design methods, guidelines and tools have been developed over the past years to support designers in implementing design for sustainable behaviour strategies. A key benefit of this approach is that it can effectively enable societal change by shaping or instilling new behaviours and habits. In this sense, it can complement other design for sustainability approaches and address some of their limitations. Despite its potential, this approach presents some important challenges and limitations, for example the ethical implications of driving user behaviour and, from a more operational perspective, the lack of metrics with which to measure the effect of design for behaviour change strategies.
