Teaching Ethics for Design for Sustainable Behaviour: A Pilot Study

Design for sustainable behaviour is an emerging activity under the banner of sustainable design which aims to reduce the environmental and social impacts of products by moderating users' interaction with them. The intended outcome of design for sustainable behaviour is to reduce negative environmental and societal impacts. However, designers' ability to passively or actively influence user behaviour and the resulting tension between choice and control raises some interesting ethical issues. Whilst several viable strategies for designing sustainable behaviour have been developed, the criterion for selecting appropriate strategies has yet to be defined and there is not, as yet, a clear consensus as to what is an acceptable level of intervention, or how to rate the severity of consequences enacted by different behaviours. Exploration of the ethical dimensions of influencing behaviour through design is limited and as such few Industrial Design programmes implicitly teach the ethics of design for sustainable behaviour as part of the curriculum. The study reported on in this paper sought to address this gap through the development and delivery of an educational pilot study to test new teaching materials concerning ethics in design. Having outlined the key processes which led to material selection and the identification of appropriate techniques, a "best-in-class" student case study is presented to illustrate the outcomes of one student project emerging from the pilot study. The paper concludes by reflecting on the appropriateness of the teaching and learning methods, the suitability of the content based on the evaluation which was carried out; and considers the challenges for lecturers in delivering content of this nature. (Contains 2 tables and 4 figures.)