Designing environmental sustainability into new products using personas at the early concept stage of the design process.

Design for sustainability is a complex and ever changing design process. With an ever increasing need to design and manufacture sustainable products there are demands put on product and industrial designers to ensure that their concepts and designs are environmentally stable, economically sound and socially beneficial. Sustainable design is an all-encompassing concept where every aspect of a product and its design process needs to be considered in relation to its impact on society, the economy and the world. It is difficult to keep all for these considerations in mind while also keeping focus on the product user. The use of personas is a widely used method used by designers in order to maintain focus on the user. Personas are hypothetical archetypes of an actual user which are based on data from real people in order to represent the target markets needs and goals. To date personas have been a widely used tool in usability design and product design but they have not been adapted and applied to sustainable design, and specifically environmentally sustainable design. The aim of this study was to develop personas to be used as a design tool that assists designers to design environmental sustainability into new products regardless of the environmental attitude and behaviour of the final user. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative data collection methods a collection of environmental personas were created. The personas created were based on a combination of positive, and negative, environmental attitudes and behaviour patterns found in Irish adult consumers. The skeleton personas were fleshed out through a series of consumer interviews where rich qualitative data was gathered on each consumer groups purchasing habits. These full personas were then tested through a series of workshops and studies. One study examined how using an environmental persona from the early concept stage of design results in a product with a greater level of sustainability built into the design when compared to a product created using image boards as a design tool. A second study carried out examined how using personas with a range of environmental personalities can result in environmentally sustainable products tailored to the needs of the individual consumer group. This study shows that using personas with an environmental personality results in designs with high levels of environmental sustainability designed into the product. They also show that environmental sustainability can be designed into a product in a manner that will appeal to the final consumer regardless of the environmental personality of that consumer. There are also findings to support the method given in order for designers to create their own, project specific, environmental personas. The findings also show that a negative attitude towards the environment coupled with a negative environmental behaviour pattern is the most prevalent in Irish adult consumers.