How design of products affects user behaviour and vice versa: the environmental implications

Most efforts to improve the environmental impact of a product focus on technological aspects. However, the biggest environmental impact, of most electronics, occurs during the Use phase. Industrial Design has developed a number of methodologies to study the way users behave with objects. This paper shows that studying user behaviour can be the first step in offering solutions to decrease a product's environmental impact during the Use phase. The research began as field experiments of the evidence to suggest feasible solutions for the short term. The research was informed by theories of affordances, ontological design and scripts.