Me, as an engineer, typically used to look first at product’s technical specification to find out what product is and does it meet my needs. This way of making decisions was changed a bit after being involved with product semantics, emotional design and such while doing research with Lotta Hassi and Pekka Kumpula about Communicating Environmental Friendliness through Product Design and Appearance. I realized the fact that product with highest specs is the best only for engineers. “Normal people” use lots of different things how they jugde the products.

 As a result from the research published in our Master’s thesis we build up a list of things that seems to help making green image for a product. Engineers believe that product with highest specs is best for them and ”normal people” are nearly as naiive when they try to evaluate product’s environmental performance without numerical facts. In other words, perceived environmental friendliness seems to be based on simple things.

 We found out that colours such as green, blue and white are telling that product is environmentally more friendly than for example black or pink. Natural materials like wood and rock are more environmentally friendly than plastics. Simple, purposeful and efficient but not too complicated design appearance beats technical or overly stylish. Sounds too simple? In general, good quality and durability were attributes that told about environmental friendliness while poor quality and dashing looks gave opposite impression about a product. Elements that remind something about nature help to create environmental frienly image. Some design elements are stronger than other. Also brand image has effect on perveived environmental friendliness.

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