Shaping the face of environmentally sustainable products: image boards and early consumer involvement in ship interior design

• Study on image board usage and design in environmentally sustainable product development.
• Image boards can elicit a range of consumer inferences about sustainability.
• Controlling what kinds of inferences are derived from a board is difficult.
• Hands-on advice for using image boards in concept testing is outlined.

The study reported in this paper addresses image board usage and environmental sustainability in the early stages of product development. Simulating the early stages of product development, image boards for three ship interior concepts were created based on different principles for environmentally sustainable design. The boards were used in interviews to elicit feedback on the concepts and to draw conclusions about how consumers make inferences about sustainability. The results of the interviews suggest that consumers infer sustainability from the appearance of interiors in a number of different ways and that image boards can elicit a range of inferences. However, the results also show that the inferences consumers make can differ widely and it is hard to control what inferences they make from an image board. Building on these results, the use of image boards in environmentally sustainable product development is discussed and hands-on advice for their use as an interview stimulus is outlined.