Sustainable design education – considering design for behavioural change

This paper reports on the development and evaluation of ‘design-behaviour’ (http://www.design-behaviour.co.uk), a web-based resource created to support the teaching of Design for Behavioural Change – a new field of enquiry in sustainable design research. The paper presents a brief introduction to sustainable design teaching in the Department of Design and Technology at Loughborough University. It goes on to outline the project methodology used to develop a web-based resource to centralise and disseminate teaching material on the subject of Design for Behavioural Change for a design and engineering audience. Selected findings from a literature review are introduced and the results of a pilot study (through which the authors explored how this subject could be taught to industrial/product design students) are discussed. The paper explains how the resource was developed and presents the results of an evaluative user questionnaire. It concludes with an outline of improvements made in response to feedback received and a discussion of further developments planned.