Design for reduced resource consumption during the use phase of products

Much work on sustainable design has focused on product manufacture/assembly and end of life. Gains in products' technical efficiency address the use phase, but how these products are used clearly affects resource consumption. This paper describes two main approaches to reduce resource consumption during product life. Firstly, interventions aim to change user behavior, through information and feedback, as well as physical product affordances abstracted from lead users to guide or steer users toward the desired behavior. Secondly, automatic adjustment of product systems performance levels based on personal user profiles and anticipated usage is implemented using artificial intelligence techniques.