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Shifts in policy and consumers’ awareness have raised the importance of sustainability in product design, inspiring the development of tools that support more sustainable design. However, such tools are not adopted as quickly as expected. To understand what tools designers consider useful, we explored how much control designers perceive over existing design strategies, and how much impact they think these strategies have. We used a survey (n = 42) and follow-up interviews (n = 12) to ask hardware product design professionals what areas they see opportunities in, and what functions they look for in tools. The findings reveal that designers perceive impact and control differently in different opportunity areas, so to increase the likelihood of adoption, tools should incorporate features that reflect those differences. Designers report the least control over aspects related to manufacturing, and also rate these as having low impact on sustainability. In contrast, designers attribute high control and impact to aspects related to their design practice and their organizations’ business model, which are tightly linked. To address these issues, designers pointed towards tools that improve information transparency, support decision-making, predict results, share knowledge, and discover user needs. Regardless of how much control designers have, they care about tools and strategies that are highly impactful.
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How Methods Make Designers
Through their combination of lifestyle and method, Silicon Valley models for tech production such as design thinking, startup incubators, lean management, etc. are spreading across the globe. These paradigms are positioned by product designers, politicians, investors and corporations alike as replicable routes to individual and national empowerment. They are portrayed as universal templates, portable across national borders and applicable to local needs. We draw from our ethnographic engagements with tech entrepreneurial efforts in Ghana, China, and Jamaica to unpack the stakes involved in their uptake, showing that while local actors produce situated alternatives, their work nevertheless often results in a continued valorization of these seemingly universal methods. We argue that design methods shape not only use practices, but have consequences for the life worlds of professional designers. This includes how they impact personal and national identities, confer legitimacy in transnational innovation circles, and secure access to social and economic resources. Ultimately, we call for an inclusion of these factors in ongoing conversations about design and design methods.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1617898
- PAR ID:
- 10048801
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI '17
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 472 to 483
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript1.0
- Conference Paper:
- https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025864
