Towards practice-oriented design for sustainability: the compatibility with selected design fields

Figures & data

Table 1 Overview of social practice theory principles relevant to the development of practice-oriented design.

	Dimension
Principles	Practice composition, practice as entity and performance	•Practices are social: they are ‘types’ of behaving and understanding that appear in different places (Reckwitz 2002)
		•Practices consist of different elements: materials, skills and images (Pantzar and Shove 2010)
		•Practices are performed: elements are integrated in bodily performances
		•Practices are internally differentiated, but guided by shared conventions or standards (Warde 2005)
		•Practices have trajectories of development, from emergence to decay (Warde 2005; Shove et al. 2007; Shove 2014)
		•Individuals – carriers of practice – are recruited to practices, have careers within them and abandon them (Reckwitz 2002; Warde 2005)
	Stability and change	•Practices are routinised but dynamic (Warde 2005)
		•Practices relate to and influence each other, and form complexes or systems of practice (Pantzar and Shove 2010; Watson 2012)
	Innovation and the role of the material	•Practices are moving targets: change is not made once and for all
		•Innovation is accomplished collectively (Warde 2005; Pantzar and Shove 2010)
		•The role of designers and interventions is indirect: change may be enabled and promoted, but what matters is the integration and transformation of elements in practice (Warde 2005; Pantzar and Shove 2010)
		•Value, needs and wants emerge from practice (Warde 2005)
		•Design and innovation are also (complexes or systems of) practices (e.g., Kimbell 2012)

Table 2 A framework for taking the social practice as unit of analysis and intervention (developed from Pettersen 2013).

Social practice as
Unit of analysis	Issues to study to map the characteristics and dynamics of the practice, including	•Service concept•Practice composition
	• environmentally relevant aspects	•Practice performance
	• what creates inertia, stability and windows of opportunity	•Relation to other practices
	• what may be relevant targets or intervention points	•Career of practice and practitioner
Unit of intervention	Issues to targetInspiration for generative work	•Circulation of elements•Practice composition and performance
		•Relationship between practices
		•Career of practice and practitioner•Internal differentiation, niche developments•Cultural variation•Historical variation

Table 3 Design for sustainability and human-centred design revisited. Overview of tensions and potentially relevant resources for the development of practice-oriented design for sustainability (developed from Pettersen 2013).

Design field	Resources for practice-oriented design	Tensions
Design for sustainability	•Tools and approaches for the identification of (variation in) environmental impacts, their source and relative size, in turn enabling prioritisation of efforts	•Technology- and product lifecycle-oriented•Little attention to the relationship between humans and the built environment
	•Sustainability goal typologies•Innovation level typologies	•Static understanding of needs and wants, the belief that demand can be extrapolated from the past
	•Tools and approaches for product- and system-level improvement and innovation	•Performance assessments require the specification of system boundaries, functional units and user scenarios, and issues outside of the system boundaries disappear out of sight (Shove 2003; Brynjarsdóttir et al. 2012). Here, they include systemic effects, what conventions are, how they have formed and what practices mean to people
		•The emphasis on expert knowledge and technological prescription makes systems susceptible to breakdown (Brynjarsdóttir et al. 2012; Scott, Bakker, and Quist 2012)
Human-centred design	•Tools and approaches for mapping current and envisioning future situations of ‘use’	•Centred on ‘users’ •Little attention to environmental sustainability
	•Emphasis on ‘user’ involvement, potentially useful in this context for generating insight/understanding and ideas, exploring novel ways of doing and/or achieving group-level change•Emphasis on iterative processes, evaluation and testing	•Static understandings of needs and wants•A focus on uncertainty reduction and optimisation of the fit between product, user and context of use•Sometimes limited attention to role of time and situational issues
	•Emphasis on multi-disciplinary collaboration
	•The use of material representations, potentially useful for de-routinising existing practices, experimenting with new bodily performances or fostering transitions
	•Emphasis on reflexivity and issues of politics, power and agency in some (critical) participatory design literature

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