Session: DFMLC-07-01/DTM-06-01: Design for Sustainable Product Use, User Behavior

Paper Number: 66708

Start Time: August 19, 02:10 PM

66708 - Validating Perceived Sustainable Design Features Using a Novel_x000B_Collage Approach 

Fierce e-commerce competition challenges designers to differentiate their products on platforms such as Amazon. To achieve this differentiation, designers must first understand how customers perceive product features. This paper builds on our previous work where we extracted features perceived as sustainable for French Press coffee carafes using annotations of Amazon reviews and natural language processing (NLP). We now test our findings with a relatively new design method of collage placement and investigate how designers can use these features to set their products apart. We created collage activities for participants to evaluate French Press products on the three pillars of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic, and on how much they like the products. During the activity participants placed products along the two axes of the collage, sustainability and likeability, and labeled the products with descriptive features that we provided. We found that participants more often selected features perceived as sustainable when placing products higher on the sustainability axis, demonstrating that these features resonated with customers. We also measured a low correlation between the two-axes of the collage activity, indicating that perceived sustainability and likeability can be measured separately. In addition, we found that product perceptions across sustainability pillars differ between demographics, however the differences average out when considering sustainability as a whole. Based on these results, we confirm that features perceived as sustainable that are extracted from online reviews resonate with customers when thinking of various sustainability pillars and that the collage is an effective tool for assessing sustainability perceptions.

Presenting Author: Nasreddine El Dehaibi Stanford University

Authors:

Nasreddine El-Dehaibi Stanford University
Ting Liao Stanford University
Erin F. Macdonald Stanford University