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A move towards a circular economy will require fundamental changes in the way products and services are designed. However, tools for design in the context of the circular economy mostly have a narrow product or service focus without acknowledging the role of addressing behaviors and changing practices. This paper presents the results of an exploratory study investigating to what extent circular design tools consider and integrate aspects related to consumption and consumers. Using five circular tools publicly available, the research team analyzed how they address three aspects: circular consumer behaviors, consumer acceptance factors and conditions for adoption. Our analysis shows that although some of the tools acknowledge the need to gather insights around consumption and consumers, they do not address such aspects in detail. When the tools considered consumer aspects, they did so by acknowledging circular consumer behaviors. Rent and rebuy are the most frequently mentioned behaviors, while remunerate, retain and renounce are absent from the tools. Other behaviors such as receive, ritualize, regard, revalue, resell and relinquish are mentioned only once. The tools’ lack of consideration of acceptance factors and contextual conditions is slightly surprising, as most of them advocate for a human-centered approach to product development. Existing circular design tools could thus benefit from integrating concepts and frameworks from fields such as design for sustainable behavior and practice-oriented design.

The MeBeSafe project intends to develop, implement and validate interventions that direct road users (drivers and cyclists) towards safer behaviour in common traffic situations which carry an elevated risk. More specifically, the aim is to change habitual traffic behaviour using different nudging interventions, i.e. subconsciously pushing road users in a desired direction without being prohibitive against alternative choices of action. The project will also compare different ways of coaching and evaluate the effect of a combination of nudging and coaching. This deliverable, D1.1 Integrated Framework, describes the work completed within WP1 of the MeBeSafe project. Based on literature reviews, interviews with academic and non-academic experts, discussions and workshops, the deliverable: (i) describes the key characteristics of nudging and coaching respectively; (ii) presents a framework that integrates the two, taking into consideration (in particular) time and frequency; (iii) describes underlying theories and models of relevance for understanding road user behaviour; (iii) explains road user profiles or characteristics of relevance to consider in the design of the interventions (i.e., in WP2, WP3, and WP4), as well as the design and interpretation of the outcome of the field trials (in WP5); and (iv) presents design considerations, i.e. factors that should be observed when improving on the initial ideas and further develop the design of the nudging and coaching interventions. More detailed design guidelines must be developed as part of the work to be completed in WP2, WP3, and WP4.