Novel Framework for Incorporating Consumer Preferences and Public Goals into Engineering Design Applied to Energy Technologies

Oregon State University, Corvallis OR

Investigators

Abstract

What drives consumers to choose to adopt products that protect common pool resources rather than continuing with current inefficient and/or polluting methods? And how can designers create products that encourage adoption despite social and financial barriers? Understanding and modeling of user choice and behavior is common in engineering design efforts to predict market share, user preference, and optimal design for consumer products where purchase motivation is plentiful. Yet these valuable tools are less commonly, and notably less easily, applied to the design of products where user uptake is key to meeting public social, environmental, economic, and security goals. For example, smart and efficient appliances and vehicles can provide significant energy savings but may offer reduced convenience and be costly to the user. Yet these technologies will only have an impact if they are desirable and affordable enough to encourage adoption by a large fraction of users, and simultaneously perform well enough to meet the public goals of society at large. This delicate balance often is difficult to achieve due to the complex system of constraints, interrelated variables, conflicting objectives, and diverse market segments. The findings of this study will help designers to develop engineered products that are likely to achieve consumer adoption levels required to realize public goals. This project also will engage students through a unique course on rural household energy and related study-abroad opportunities. The course will cover issues addressed in this research and provide students experience with fieldwork techniques needed to understand rural and underserved communities. The objective of this research is to create and demonstrate a modeling framework that enables a more rigorous integration of consumer preference and public goal considerations into engineering design decisions. This will be achieved through a novel integration of techniques from user-centered design, computational social sciences, environmental psychology, usage context-based design, and agent-based modeling. The general framework will be demonstrated extensively in the context of designing household energy-related technologies. A multidisciplinary team of collaborators will combine new and existing real-world data with models of the current state of the user environment, technological options, potential actions and strategies, social norms, and utility functions to predict the consumer attitude, choice, and adoption behavior. This adoption model will be integrated into an existing systems-level model developed by the PI with prior NSF support to predict the outcomes of technological strategies in terms of a holistic set of objectives. Simulation results will inform engineering designers about the complex outcomes generated by various strategies across a community energy system.