VISUALIZING GREEN: COMMUNICATING ENVIRONMENTAL FRIENDLINESS THROUGH PRODUCT DESIGN AND APPEARANCE
Last summer we finished our cross-disciplinary master’s thesis with the title of Communicating Environmental Friendliness through Product Design and Appearance. Our team consisted of Pekka Kumpula from University of Art and Design, Jouni Riuttanen from University of Technology and me, Lotta Hassi, from the School of Economics. We combined forces to study whether environmental friendliness of a product could be communicated by using the products design style and appearance (form, color, texture, material, texture, etc.).
At the moment the promotion of environmental friendliness to consumers has mainly been achieved through means of adding technical information to the product: labeling and logos, certificates, advertisements and information on the Internet. Companies communicate their environmental message through different media, but they seem to be overlooking one central means of communication: the product itself. Current green products show no consistent green message – the consumer is not offered any visual clues to distinguish the green products from the so called brown ones. What interests us is to find ways to let the physical product communicate its environmental friendliness.
Our approach was novel in the sense that our thesis was the first one done together between students from three universities, but also in the sense that communicating environmental friendliness through the product itself has yet been studied rather little.
After familiarizing with existing literature on the subject, we conducted a two-phase study. In the qualitative part we interviewed people to form hypotheses on “what a green product looks like”. Thereafter we conducted a quantitative study to test the hypotheses and to form conclusions.
We did find elements of design style and appearance that are generally considered to carry a pro-environmental message and also elements that do not support an environmentally friendly message.
The three of us will now discuss the results of the study here.
