There has been a great deal of focus in the sustainability sector in recent years on the importance of the role of design, and of making better design decisions, in order to achieve sustainable production and consumption. There is a wealth of prescriptive academic literature proposing ways of making more sustainable design decisions, often from a rational, engineering design perspective. Numerous tools and methods are offered to designers to help improve their decision-making taking into account multiple criteria. Yet there is recognition in science and technology literature, often based on ethnographic research, that professional designers working in industry may have limited power to make design decisions in practice, and that instead a complex network of stakeholders is involved. Related to this, there have been ongoing debates about whether designers can be responsible for the impacts of the things they design, such as the impacts on the environment, if their agency to make decisions is limited. Yet there is limited empirical research on how designers themselves report their roles in design decisions and who may be responsible for decisions. There is also a focus in prescriptive design literature on how to take stakeholders’ values, including designers’ values, into account in design decision-making. For example, the Value Sensitive Design method proposes that stakeholders’ values can be identified and used to inform design decisions. Yet there is limited understanding of how personal values may come into the design process when a specific values-focused method is not used. This project seeks to examine these three psychological concepts of decision-making, personal values, and responsibility from the perspective of how they are constructed and managed in talk about sustainable design, using a discursive psychology (DP) approach. While interviews are commonly used to study how designers work, they are usually analysed using content analysis of participants’ talk, whereas DP enables examination of both sides of the interview interaction and takes into account how prior talk influences what is said. Talk about design has been collected for this project using semi-structured interviews with sustainability-focused product designers, and from video recordings of panel discussions at design conferences. Extracts of data have been transcribed using Jefferson notations, to indicate features such as change of pace, volume, pauses, and laughter, to give richer insights into the interactional talk and actions. Analysis of extracts focuses on patterns in how designers talk about design decisions and other types of decisions, how they portray the role of personal values in their work, and how different types of responsibility are constructed regarding responsibility for sustainability in design. Findings based on common sequences noticed in interactional talk provide insights into the designers’ portrayal of their roles and identities.
Semi-structured interviews were planned with sustainability-focused product designers. An interview guide was prepared to ask questions about a design project of the participant’s choice, focusing on how decisions were made, the role of personal values, and responsibility for sustainability. Participants were recruited primarily via LinkedIn, through directly contacting members who described themselves as product or industrial designers working on or interested in sustainable design. Sixteen interviews took place by video call (during a coronavirus pandemic when many places were locked down), using Microsoft Teams, from July to October 2020. Interviews lasted an average of forty-five minutes.
