Changing behaviours towards green living in the US

The Challenge of Understanding 'Eco-Aware' Lifestyles 

In a collaboration across the US, UK and Japan, this exploratory project focused on people’s attitudes towards ‘green living’, and the opportunities for new services concepts that could be derived from that. Commissioned by a global electronics company, with the main client team based in Japan, the UK and US, Reach partners Stby and Portigal Consulting closely collaborated on the design research among client’s US-based target audience, and also on subsequent the co-creation workshops with the client team.

Ethnographic Research and Design Documentaries 

The fieldwork and concept creation workshops were jointly done in California, with the interdisciplinary client team present. To communicate the observations from the field in a strong, empathic way, the approach Reach employed was to create short films on location, where participants interacted with probes that served as stimuli for speculative conversations. The results of the fieldwork were analysed and mapped onto a framework that described the process of behaviour change that people go through when trying to live a more green life. This detailed framework became valuable because it could also accommodate concepts that were in development; thus making a connection between the concepts and people’s everyday struggles with ‘going green.’