Exploring behavioural psychology to support design for sustainable behaviour research

Increased focus in research on the environmental consequences of behaviour and product use in the last decade has resulted in a number of proposed different design strategies that may stimulate desired behavioural patterns or help avoiding undesired ones. Although this provides understanding of how behaviour may be changed, there has been limited discussion about how to choose and apply the different strategies depending on the context. This paper aims to investigate how behavioural models and theories from social psychology can contribute to this discussion. The analysis is based on an identification of different factors that affect behaviour and a distribution of design strategies according to how they divide control between the user and the product. By investigating how variation in the division of control may be related to the factors affecting behaviour, a number of principles for selecting strategies may be derived.