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Abstract Clean technologies aim to address climatic, environmental, and health concerns associated with their conventional counterparts. However, such technologies achieve these goals only if they are adopted by users and effectively replace conventional practices. Despite the important role that users play to accomplish these goals by making decisions whether to adopt such clean alternatives or not, currently, there is no systematic framework for quantitative integration of the behavioral motivations of users during the design process for these technologies. In this study, the theory of planned behavior (TPB) is integrated with usage-context-based design to provide a holistic approach for predicting the market share of clean versus conventional product alternatives based on users’ personal beliefs, social norms, and perception of behavioral control. Based on the mathematical linkage of the model components, technology design attributes can then be adjusted, resulting in the design of products that are more in line with users’ behavioral intentions, which can lead to higher adoption rates. The developed framework is applied in a case study of adoption of improved cookstoves in a community in Northern Uganda. Results indicate that incorporating TPB attributes into utility functions improves the prediction power of the model and that the attributes that users in the subject community prioritize in a clean cookstove are elicited through the TPB. Households’ decision-making behavior before and after a trial period suggests that design and marketing strategy should systematically integrate user’s behavioral tendencies prior to interventions to improve the outcomes of clean technology implementation projects. 

Understanding and integrating a user’s decision-making process into design and implementation strategies for clean energy technologies may lead to higher product adoption rates and ultimately increased impacts, particularly for those products that require a change in habit or behavior. To evaluate the key attributes that formulate a user’s decision-making behavior to adopt a new clean technology, this study presents the application of the Theory of Planned Behavior, a method to quantify the main psychological attributes that make up a user’s intention for health and environmental behaviors. This theory was applied to the study of biomass cookstoves. Surveys in two rural communities in Honduras and Uganda were conducted to evaluate households’ intentions regarding adoption of improved biomass cookstoves. Multiple ordered logistic regressions method presented the most statistically significant results for the collected data of the case studies. Baseline results showed users had a significant positive mindset to replace their traditional practices. In Honduras, users valued smoke reduction more than other attributes and in average the odds for a household with slightly higher attitude toward reducing smoke emissions were 2.1 times greater to use a clean technology than someone who did not value smoke reduction as much. In Uganda, less firewood consumption was the most important attribute and on average the odds for households were 1.9 times more to adopt a clean technology to save fuel than someone who did not value fuelwood saving as much. After two months of using a cookstove, in Honduras, households’ perception of the feasibility of replacing traditional stoves, or perceived behavioral control, slightly decreased suggesting that as users became more familiar with the clean technology they perceived less hindrances to change their traditional habits. Information such as this could be utilized for design of the technologies that require user behavior changes to be effective. 

While improved cookstoves have been designed and distributed for decades with the goal of addressing the human health and environmental issues caused by traditional biomass cooking methods, they often have not achieved the intended impact. One of the main reasons for this shortcoming is that engineers often focus on technical attributes of cookstove designs, such as improved fuel and combustion efficiency, but neglect usability. If a stove design does not meet a cook’s needs and preferences, the stove will likely be used only as a supplement to a traditional stove, or not used at all. To help close this gap, a testing protocol for cookstove usability was developed. The proposed protocol is based on established usability practices from fields such as software and consumer product design, and includes usability criteria taken from existing cookstove research and interviews with subject experts. The protocol includes objective and subjective testing methods, is designed to elicit user perceptions of and the relative importance of each usability criterion in a given context, and incorporates ethnographic methods to improve validity in cross-cultural applications and in diverse testing scenarios. This protocol may be useful to stove designers as a way to better understand users and validate or improve designs, to implementers as a method to assist with the selection of the most appropriate stove for a project, and to researchers as a tool to assess cookstoves and cookstove programs. Preliminary field and laboratory work to test the validity of the protocol demonstrated a mixture of meaningful and uncertain results, indicating that while it is a reasonable tool to assess cookstove usability, the protocol requires interpretation of qualitative data and assessment of uncertainty to be most effective.