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Design, Fun and Sustainability: Utilizing Design Research Methods to Develop an Application to Inform and Motivate Students to Make Sustainable Consumer Choices

Dreser, Melanie

Abstract Details

2011, Master of Fine Arts, Ohio State University, Industrial, Interior Visual Communication Design.

Nowadays, when we talk about sustainability or environmentally friendly practices, we try to convince groups or individuals to be good citizens or good people. Especially young people do not care deeply about pursuing an environmentally conscious lifestyle if it requires an effort on their part.

What if one uses fun to influence (i.e., motivate and inform) students about sustainability in their daily life? Would this approach be more successful in changing their behavior? Can sustainability even be considered to be fun? As we already know, behavior change requires motivation and fun could be used as a motivational factor. Proposing that we need to develop programs and concepts that make a sustainable lifestyle fun instead of perceiving it as a negative influence on our quality of life provides new opportunities for projects and interventions.

When we make sustainable practices fun, the likelihood to adapt such a new behavior increases.

Behavioral change results from a combination of three factors, namely, awareness, information and motivation, which is the most important starting point for fun.

This thesis addresses the difficulties in informing and motivating students to choose a sustainable lifestyle by focusing on their consumer behavior. With a fun and playful application, the user should be able to learn and inform herself or himself about a sustainable lifestyle and be motivated to integrate it into her or his own daily life.

By offering multiple choices of action as well as the opportunity to be and act as a part of a whole group (i.e., collective action), competition and therefore motivation should be raised. This results from the idea that fun can be experienced both individually or as a group. Design Research is the main tool to develop this informational and motivational application. Research on the target group, in combination with existing case studies in design and the psychological aspects of human decision making, will lead to a design application. The resulting methodology could be used for any target group.

Paul Nini, J (Committee Chair)
Elizabeth Sanders, B.-N. (Committee Member)
Carolina Gill (Committee Member)
351 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Dreser, M. (2011). Design, Fun and Sustainability: Utilizing Design Research Methods to Develop an Application to Inform and Motivate Students to Make Sustainable Consumer Choices [Master's thesis, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1322669294

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Dreser, Melanie. Design, Fun and Sustainability: Utilizing Design Research Methods to Develop an Application to Inform and Motivate Students to Make Sustainable Consumer Choices. 2011. Ohio State University, Master's thesis. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1322669294.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Dreser, Melanie. "Design, Fun and Sustainability: Utilizing Design Research Methods to Develop an Application to Inform and Motivate Students to Make Sustainable Consumer Choices." Master's thesis, Ohio State University, 2011. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1322669294

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)