How Value-Sensitive Design Can Empower Sustainable Consumption
This addresses the problem of overwhelming consumers with complex product choices for sustainable consumption, offering a practical tool for individuals and businesses, though it is incremental in applying value-sensitive design to shopping.
The paper tackles the challenge of enabling sustainable consumption by developing a smartphone app that provides transparent product information and explainable ratings, leading to increased sustainability awareness and a behavioral shift in real-world supermarket experiments.
In a so-called overpopulated world, sustainable consumption is of existential importance.However, the expanding spectrum of product choices and their production complexity challenge consumers to make informed and value-sensitive decisions. Recent approaches based on (personalized) psychological manipulation are often intransparent, potentially privacy-invasive and inconsistent with (informational) self-determination. In contrast, responsible consumption based on informed choices currently requires reasoning to an extent that tends to overwhelm human cognitive capacity. As a result, a collective shift towards sustainable consumption remains a grand challenge. Here we demonstrate a novel personal shopping assistant implemented as a smart phone app that supports a value-sensitive design and leverages sustainability awareness, using experts' knowledge and "wisdom of the crowd" for transparent product information and explainable product ratings. Real-world field experiments in two supermarkets confirm higher sustainability awareness and a bottom-up behavioral shift towards more sustainable consumption. These results encourage novel business models for retailers and producers, ethically aligned with consumer preferences and with higher sustainability.