A Culture-Inspired Approach to Designing Sustainable Practice: A study of sustainable bathing practice for the Living Lab project

A Culture-Inspired Approach to Designing Sustainable Practice: A study of sustainable bathing practice for the Living Lab project

Matsuhashi, N.

Kuijer, S.C. (mentor)
De Jong, A.M. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

2009-10-28

Introduction: This study explores a method to designing less resource-intensive forms of everyday life. The method is geared toward the early phase of product development, which is the generation of insights and design ideas. Looking at daily behavior, one can observe clear differences between different cultures. From this observation, the study takes the assumption that “Looking at cultural diversity of daily practice can increase the variety of insights, which will be a source of inspiration for designers.” An approach based on this assumption was named ‘Culture-inspired approach’ and explored as an add-on feature of the practice-oriented co-design approach for designing less resource-intensive everyday life. Aims: The aims of this study are: • Build up knowledge about the use of information on cultural diversity of everyday practice as a source of insight and idea generation for designing less resource-intensive practices • Explore a method for collecting information on resource-consuming everyday practices from multiple cultures and communicating the collected information to designers Approach: This study took a two-step approach: • In Phase 1, an experimental culture survey addressing a topic of the practice ‘bathing’ was conducted in the three countries, the Netherlands, Japan and India • In Phase 2, an experimental creative session for designing less resource-intensive bathing practices was conducted with participation of product designers Research questions and conclusions: 1. What kinds of information about cultural diversity of daily practice can play a role in generating insights and design ideas for less resource-intensive practice? The kinds of information play a role in the design process can be divided into two types. First type is the information used for understanding daily pracitce in different cultures. This type of information is for example, ‘local context’, ‘facilities and products’ and ‘procedure of the practice.’ The other type is the information that can help insight and idea generation. ‘variety of styles and their respective resource consumption’, ’expectations of actions with resource use’ and ‘feelings and emotions during the action’ are cited as examples of the type of this information. These findings were reflected in the specification of recording units for a survey on the everyday practice. 2. What kinds of insights and ideas are developed from information about cultural diversity of daily practice? By utilizing these types of information, three kinds of insights were generated, they were: 1) keys of reducing resource utilization, 2) points of concern in reducing resource utilization and 3) keys of exploring new possible styles of the practice. Meanwhile, using the same information, designers successfully developed a number of ideas for new bathing practice. Their ideas were likely to be ‘practice-oriented’ ideas, which go beyond their current bathing practice, such as ‘sponge bed bathing’ and ‘bathing suit.’ 3. How to collect the information about daily practice from multiple cultures? The self-observation probe with a feature of recording the practice by a set of elements was successful in collecting information on the everyday practice from people in three countries. The recording format ‘Action cards’ increased the precision of data on use of the water during bath time. On the other hand, conducting an experimental survey brought knowledge of the issues in the process and methods for collecting information on the everyday practice from multiple cultures. The challenges in the survey process were for example, ‘need for contact person in unfamiliar countries’ and ‘handling of the difference in communication means between the cultures.’ The challenges in the survey methods were for example, ‘definition of single action’ and ‘handling of the difference in means for recording resource use between the cultures.'

cross-cultural research
eco-design
design methods
household routines
product development
sustainability
user-centered design

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:03c324a3-41f5-428c-af68-e7c8f34a1ba2

2010-10-28

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2009 Matsuhashi, N.