Validating Perceived Sustainable Design Features Using a Novel Collage Approach

Designers are challenged to create sustainable products that resonate with customers, often focusing on engineered sustainability while neglecting perceived sustainability. We previously proposed a method for extracting perceived sustainable features from online reviews using annotations and natural language processing (NLP), testing our method with French press coffee carafes. We identified that perceived sustainability may not always align with engineered sustainability. We now investigate how designers can validate perceived features extracted from online reviews using a relatively new design method of collage placement where participants drag and drop products on a two-by-two axis collage and select features from a dropdown menu. We created collage activities for participants to evaluate French press products on the three aspects of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic, and on how much they like the products. During the activity, participants placed products along the two axes of the collage, sustainability and likeability, and labeled products with descriptive features. We found that participants more often selected our previously extracted features when placing products higher on the sustainability axis, validating that the perceived sustainable features resonate with users. We also measured a low correlation between the two axes of the collage activity, indicating that perceived sustainability and likeability can be measured separately. In addition, we found that product perceptions across sustainability aspects may differ between demographics. Based on these results, we confirm that the collage is an effective tool for validating sustainability perceptions and that features perceived as sustainable from online reviews resonate with customers when thinking of various sustainability aspects.