Informed Design for Sustainable Growth

Lahti Growth model in the Lahti University of Applied Sciences is joining together the regional hub for design competence and the committed development of circular economy solutions. On the strategic level the circular solutions try to prevent waste from occurring in any part of the production and consumption process. This demands also design for user consumer behavior change. New emphasis for design education is required with guiding students in solving this behavior change challenge instead of designing concrete products. The user research for green behavior change reveals practical everyday, social life and interest related hindrances explaining the typical attitude – behavior gap with green actions. From the the user perspective the need is for service thinking based solutions, where the information communication, findability and availability of the offering amongst the everyday activities and interests is essential. This paper presents three into the design education integrated cases that present possibilities of the circular economy design and fulfill some important aspets of the user needs. The information design case for renewable energy production in the countryside developed both static posters and storytelling based animations about the horse manure based energy possibilities. The renewable energy research results data wrangling was integrated with information design ideas and visualisation production. The information design project produced results for clear, positive, context related and systemic information delivery. It also produced communication messaging about the normality, savings and history related sensibility achieved through recycling and producing renewable energy in the countryside. The second design case was about preowned product recycling possibilities through applying user information and service design process. The cross-disciplinary students' efforts produced finable, positive and without a car available service process, house cleaning and preowned product collecting services and activities for sharing, reuse, repair and redesign. These results provided easily usable activities for the consumer user with visible and meaningful results and possibilities for social sharing. Sustainable urban living example case dealt with bus travelling systems. Applying emphatic design thinking process to cross-disciplinary learning the work produced an application concept to support city visitors in bus travelling and a concept to incorporate intercative and challeging games to the bus company offerings. The user driven bus travelling design provided clear and easily obtainable information, easily findable and usable bus travel possibilities for the visitors. The engaging and social side of solutions was also covered. The implemented and analysed project cases show that by appropriating user driven and emphatic design process, research knowledge integration, systemic thinking, and cross-disciplinary, collaborative aspects in design education offers means to tackle the circular economy behavior change challenges. Methods for information design, systems analysis, user driven design and co-design become the core of the behavior change enabling design instead of concrete product development methods.