Understanding roles of care in the design process for sustainable behaviour: commitment and responsibility in packaging reuse

Care practice often relates to provoking an emotional or affective response from users, satisfying emotional needs and thus encouraging care for the product. Care practice in the process of promoting feelings of responsibility and commitment towards products, services and the environment to users also encourages sustainable behaviour. However, there is little formal interpretation of the pragmatic approach of care in the context of the design process for sustainable behaviour – essentially, how we adapt this meaning of care to the process of design for sustainable behaviour. Reuse is a form of sustainable behaviour; eliciting such behaviour requires a good understanding of forms of care that involve responsibility and commitment during the design process, as these encourage users to care about the situation and take care of objects in order to sustain their condition, or, where this is not possible, to reduce obsolescence by returning objects to manufacturers (or shops), or recycling them. This paper explores the formal role of forms of care involving responsibility and commitment in the design process. The blueprint for a design process for reuse behaviour was developed with six packaging design professionals, confirming that providing a feeling of responsibility and commitment to users should be considered at an early stage. The adapted design process was applied in two packaging reuse design studies, providing a better understanding of the role of these forms of care to designers as a means to create meaningful interaction and thus a better user-object relationship. Promoting reuse behaviour to users by considering user responsibility and commitment as an essential basis of design enables conscious decision-making and attitude change in users, triggering and motivating behaviour and subsequently enabling lasting behaviour change.