Conference Agenda

Climate change, an urgent threat to millions of lives, requires collective efforts to advance a low-carbon transition. In particular, as future citizens, adolescents play a key role in shaping a low-carbon future. To understand how their potential can be supported, this study examines how design, particularly through human-computer interaction as a technology-mediated approach, can encourage adolescents to adopt low-carbon behavior. To do so, a formative study was conducted. First, we conducted a survey to understand adolescents’ cognitive levels and behavioral characteristics. Findings from this stage reveal that adolescents’ low-carbon behavior can be cultivated before a conscious understanding is established. Building on this, we organized a participatory design workshop where educators, designers, and adolescents co-created interaction-oriented design principles. These findings further highlight the need for a monitoring-feedback system, so we developed an initial wearable prototype to facilitate adolescents’ reflections on the environmental impact of their behavior.

Fast fashion accounts for continuous labor exploitation and 8-10% of global carbon emissions, perpetuating environmental degradation. Yet consumer awareness alone often fails to drive sustainable behavior. This systematic literature review aimed to understand how psychological and communication elements can be used to design an intervention capable of changing consumption behavior. Following PRISMA 2020 methodology, 103 peer-reviewed studies were analyzed from 1,384 papers retrieved across six academic databases. Three thematic strands emerged: sustainable consumer behavior and decision-making, visual and aesthetic influence on awareness, and artificial intelligence in engagement contexts. Findings reveal that consciousness alone is insufficient; interventions are suggested to combine construal level theory, emotional commitment through loss-framed messaging, and visually rich communication for effectively reducing psychological distance and fostering empathy toward sustainability issues. The review identifies significant potential in incorporating AI-generated art that could provide dynamic and contextually relevant experiences to encourage reflection and promote more sustainable consumption patterns.

The way consumers buy, care for, and discard their furniture reveals complex motivations that extend beyond cost and function. This paper examines the connection between consumer values, emotional attachment, and discard practices in determining the lifespan of furniture. Drawing on data from a mixed-methods approach that uses a survey, ethnographic observations, and object interviews, it analyses how consumers negotiate repair, justify replacement, and assign value to objects. It is argued that furniture consumption cannot be reduced to personal preference and market availability. Instead, it is influenced by cultural norms, consumer mobility, and access to durable goods. This paper proposes design strategies for extending furniture lifetimes and challenges fast consumption. In an age of disposability, what we choose to keep or discard reveals as much about society as about our homes.

Design for sustainability transitions is an emerging field within design for sustainability that aims to provide guidelines and strategies to generate systemic change in society, mostly at the socio-technical system level. Nevertheless, some limitations of current approaches have been pointed out by scholars, including their market-centered perspective and the vague definition of the sustainability visions adopted. To overcome these limitations, a shift towards a heterodox economic perspective is needed. Such a shift could help define new goals for design – satisfying fundamental human needs – through an integrative vision of humans within their environment. The city scale appears particularly appropriate for this purpose. In this paper, a conceptual framework is presented, based on the provisioning systems heuristic model and the integration of the milieu (Umwelt) approach, to re-think our relations with non-humans.

This study supports the shift towards more sustainable industrial design sketch modelling (the making of expressive models for problem solving) by detailing the material needs and sustainability concerns that result from the practice’s disposable nature. This transition also provides another opportunity to embed sustainable thinking throughout industry, as sketch modelling is taught early in a designer’s education. This study is centred around an overview of the literature on the roles and life cycles of commonly associated materials, with a focus on paper derivatives, polystyrene and polyurethane foam. The polymer foams, in particular, can result in widespread environmental harm, from their petroleum-derived production to the generation of microplastic dust during modelling. Beyond emphasising that future material recommendations should be more specific, such as suggesting “fully recycled unbleached paper” instead of just “paper”, more specialised environmental data is needed alongside presenting it in a way that best supports design practitioners and educators.

While academic research on design for sustainability and design for subjective well-being has grown for decades, application of these perspectives in professional practice remains underdeveloped. Professional designers often struggle to translate these objectives into their work due to conflicting demands, including tight project timelines, cost targets, and manufacturing constraints. Tools and methods developed in academic contexts have faced criticism for failing to consider these practical concerns, resulting in limited professional adoption. Studies indicate professional designers could benefit from concrete case-studies for existing products and systems that clearly demonstrate both processes and outcomes. This paper addresses this need through an artifact-analysis approach, developing case-studies of twelve existing design solutions that have yielded positive sustainability and well-being outcomes. Although not necessarily core drivers of the original projects, our systematic analysis and resulting design guidelines provide clear, concrete direction for designers seeking to create more responsible products and systems in their practices.