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If people care about the environment, then why don't they buy green products? In order to provide design-relevant answers to this question, I perform research at the intersection of engineering, marketing, and psychology. I not only merge insights from the three fields, but also generate new synergistic design methods built from the different research paradigms. In answer to the above question, this synergy begins with a single premise: To create successful green products, design methodologies must accept and accommodate the construction of preference and resulting customer preference inconsistencies.
I view what others typically refer to as "customer needs" as strong customer preference, or the choice of one alternative over another. Research from behavioral psychology and experimental economics asserts that individuals construct preferences on a case-by-case basis when called to make a decision - a theory termed the construction of preferences. The details of a specific decision case are termed decision context. A common, implicit assumption in design is that customer preferences exist a priori, regardless of decision context. Preferences may be significantly different across decision contexts, leading to preference inconsistency. Failure to note construction of preference in design methodologies results in products that are tailored to be preferred in one decision context, but may not be preferred in other contexts. I aim to incorporate construction of preference into design methodologies, identify useful heuristics in product design, and gain a broader understanding of decision perspectives in design, organized as three research themes:
Design for Construction of Preference
Product design can accommodate preference inconsistency reactively or proactively. I model a reactive approach to preference inconsistency as a joint engineering/marketing design optimization with robust design for uncertainty in a preference parameter. In the proactive approach, this uncertain parameter becomes a variable under the assumption that product heuristics can be used to trigger a specific construction of preference.
Product Purchase and Use Heuristics
Judgments and decisions about products have specialized decision heuristics. Product heuristics are related to information conveyed in product design, reaching beyond direct perceptual information to other cognitive processes. I have discovered one such heuristic, the crux sentinel attribute relationship.
Decision Perspectives in Product Design
Judgments and decisions enter into the product design process from a variety of parties with vested interest. Preferences have different levels of consistency across report forms, type of decision, and particular decider. I demonstrated that people consistently imagine which product attributes will delight them, but do not consistently imagine which product attributes will be necessities.
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