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This thesis presents new theories and creative techniques for exploring ‘designing for home happiness'. Set in the context of a primarily unsustainable and unhappy world, home is understood as a facilitator of current lifestyle practices that could also support long-term happiness activities, shown to promote more sustainable behaviour. It has yet to be examined extensively from a happiness perspective and many homes lack opportunities for meaningful endeavours. Service Design, an approach that supports positive interactions, shows potential in facilitating ‘designing for home happiness' but its tools are generally employed for visualising new systems/services or issues within existing ones instead of exploring related subjectivity. Art therapy techniques, historically used for expressing felt experiences, present applicable methods for investigating such subjective moments and shaping design opportunities for home happiness but have yet to be trialled in a design research context. This thesis therefore explores how Art Therapy and Service Design can be used successfully for ‘designing for home happiness'. A first study proposes photo elicitation as a creative method to explore, with participants from UK family households, several significant home happiness needs. Subsequently, art therapy techniques are proposed in Study 2 through two bespoke Happy-Home Workshops. This gives way to the Home Happiness Theory and Designing for Home Happiness Theory, which enable designers to design for home happiness. The Designing for Home Happiness Framework emerges from these studies proposing a new design creative method delivered through a workshop with specialised design tools and accompanying process for creating home happiness designs (i.e. services, product-service-systems). Through two Main Studies the framework is tested and validated with design experts in two different contexts, Loughborough (UK) and Limerick (Ireland), confirming its suitability and transferability in ‘designing for home happiness'. Resulting concepts support collective home happiness and social innovations by facilitating appropriate social contexts for their development. Overall, this research is the first to combine art therapy techniques with service design methods, offering original theories and approaches for ‘designing for home happiness' within Service Design and for social innovation. Collectively, this research delivers new creative methods for service designers, social innovators and designers more generally to investigate and support happier experiences within and outside the home for a more sustainable future.

Inspired by the question of the Club of Rome as to Design could help to translate the ubiquitous knowledge on sustainability into daily practise and Peter Senge's belief on mental models as a limiting factor to implementation of systemic insight (Senge 2006), we explored working with mental models as a sustainable design tool. We propose a definition for design uses. At the 7th Sustainable Summer School we collected general unsustainable mental models and "designed" sustainable ones. These mental models were tested as a part of the briefing to student projects and evaluated by the students. Analysing an existing product portfolio, we tested the ability of mental models to aid the creation of strategic design advice. We argue that mental models in the form of associative thinking and cognitive metaphors have been part of designing all along and overlap in nature with design methodologies to such an extent that they are sublimely suited to be used as a design tool. We summarize our prototyping exercises with the proposal of a design process using mental models to root sustainability in design practise and thinking beyond present-day eco-design (Liedtke et al 2013, Luttropp and Lagerstedt 2006, Pigosso and McAloone 2015).

Our understanding of the effects that human production and consumption has on our planet and its resources has challenged us to think differently when developing new products. In response to these problems, Eco Design has been developed over the last few decades. Eco Design is a process integrated into product and engineering design that aims to lower the environmental impact of products across their life cycle, whilst not hindering design brief criteria such as function, price, performance, and quality. Research in Eco Design has focused mainly on the development of new tools and ways to implement Eco Design in industry. However, there is still little empirical knowledge today regarding the state of Eco Design implementation and practices in industry; in addition to the prerequisite needs and factors to successfully implement Eco Design. The aim of this research has been to review the level and type of Eco Design in the British Product Design industry and to identify recurrent themes helping or hindering implementation. This was achieved through the use of a pilot study followed by a two stage case study design, involving 20 cases and 57 participants across 65 interviews. The investigation and its analysis produced 12 confirmed themes, each generating their own drivers and barriers to Eco Design implementation. This research into Eco Design implementation provides a unique contribution and a timely insight into the Eco Design practices of the British Product Design industry today. The research also provides the novel contribution of identifying the drivers and barriers to implementing and sustaining Eco Design, as well as an understanding of the strengths and shortfalls of the current Eco Design processes and tools. These contributions to knowledge in the field of Eco Design will help future research formulate better solutions to implement Eco Design processes in the Product Design industry.

This thesis investigates the influence that cultural differences have in the designing of products and services that encourage sustainable lifestyles. This was researched through a case study of dishwashing practices in Mexico and the UK, and the development of a methodological framework for supporting designers working in cross-cultural contexts. Designers can shift user behaviour to be more responsible, and by doing this, reduce a product s impact on the use phase of its lifecycle. Nevertheless, designing products that successfully drive behaviour towards a more sustainable path can only be accomplished if they are conceived to fit the user and the specific context of interaction. In order to do so, designers must truly understand the users, and take into account the complex web of factors that lay behind individual behaviour. A comprehensive review of the literature established an understanding of human behaviour and the emergence and evolution of practices and routines. This brought to light the diverse behavioural patterns in different contexts; and was further investigated with a scoping study in two different locations (Mexico and the UK), exploring general water consuming practices in the home, specifically manual dishwashing practices. The preliminary findings shaped a study that aimed to deepen the understanding of these practices in the selected sites, involving the use of Cultural Probes and videoing people in their common kitchen environment. A robust and clear image of washing-up practices emerged with rich and detailed data presented in different media, ideal to be implemented in a design process. To this end, a series of multicultural Personas were created as the direct outcome of the Cultural Probes and the scoping study, giving way to the design studies phase of the project, carried out with industrial design students in Mexico and the UK. A design brief for sustainable washing up practices was delivered. Design experiments were used to provide interesting evidence of the influence in the design process of the designers understanding of the target user. The findings indicate that designers benefit from exploration and creativity tools tailored directly from the user-research findings in the early design process. This increases the level of empathy towards the user, particularly making it easier to design for users with different needs and contexts than the designers themselves. It also helps designers to better apply design for sustainable behaviour framework to their concept designs.

„Avoiding Design“ bezeichnet nicht nur das Verhindern durch Design, sondern auch das Vermeiden von Design an sich – also das bewusste Nicht-Designen, um Produkte grundlegend an ihrer Entstehung zu hindern. Es schafft ein Bewusstsein dafür, dass ein gleicher oder größerer Nutzen für die Nachhaltigkeit erzeugt wird, wenn man etwas so belässt wie es ist oder etwas wegnimmt, anstatt etwas hinzuzufügen. Die Natur des Designs ist formgebend und in die Welt hinein entwerfend. Dass das Ergebnis des Designprozesses aber auch formnehmend oder verwerfend sein kann, wird kaum in Betracht gezogen. Anstatt bestehende Produkte nur einem nachhaltigen Redesign zu unterziehen oder völlig neue hinzuzufügen, müssen Designentscheidungen grundlegend hinterfragt und rückgängig gemacht werden, um die Anzahl von Produkten insgesamt zu reduzieren.

This exploratory study is a first attempt to translate the Indian cultural context from a socio-cultural, and legal perspective by identifying the values attributed to Indian textile craftsmanship by Indian textile and fashion stakeholders, and how their perspective is influenced by the global recognition and perception of Indian textile crafts and connotation of “Made in India”. At the same time the study investigates the meaning of “sustainability” in the Indian cultural context, in relation to textile craftsmanship, and how this relates to the Western concept of “sustainability”. Through field research in conjunction with a series of in-depth unstructured interviews, this study reveals that Cultural Sustainability is the dominating narrative in the Indian cultural context due to the prevalence of culturally embedded sustainability practices and the role of textile craftsmanship in sustaining livelihood, being a unique exercise of positioning Indian textile craftsmanship within a framework of cultural heritage as a valuable source of knowledge for sustainable practices in the fashion and textile industry. Unique about this study are the India-centric approach combined with the ethnicity of the subjects interviewed - who are, without exception, Indian nationals, whose work, voice and reputation are shaping India's contemporary textile craft -sustainability narrative (being referred to as the “Indian textiles and fashion elite”) and the framing of traditional craftsmanship from a legal perspective, introducing the notion of legal protection of traditional textile knowledge and traditional cultural expressions.

aus dem Inhalt: „Designer:innen stehen heute vor der komplexen Aufgabe ihre Designdienstleistungen transparent und nachvollziehbar Richtung Kreislaufwirtschaft auszurichten. Ein neu entwickeltes Toolkit für Circular Design hilft alle Dimensionen der Produktgestaltung zu berücksichtigen und einen Dialog auf Augenhöhe mit den Hersteller:innen zu führen....”