Validating perceived sustainable design features using a novel collage approach

Fierce e-commerce competition challenges designers to differentiate their products on platforms such as Amazon. To achieve this differentiation, designers must first understand how customers perceive product features. This paper builds on our previous work where we extracted features perceived as sustainable for French Press coffee carafes using annotations of Amazon reviews and natural language processing (NLP). We identified a gap between customer perceptions of sustainability and engineered sustainability. We now test our findings with a relatively new design method of collage placement and investigate how designers can use perceived features to set their products apart. We created collage activities for participants to evaluate French Press products on the three aspects of sustainability: social, environmental, and economic, and on how much they like the products. During the activity participants placed products along the two axes of the collage, sustainability and likeability, and labeled products with descriptive features that we provided. We found that participants more often selected features perceived as sustainable when placing products higher on the sustainability axis, demonstrating that these features resonated with customers. We also measured a low correlation between the two-axes of the collage activity, indicating that perceived sustainability and likeability can be measured separately. In addition, we found that product perceptions across sustainability aspects may differ between demographics. Based on these results, we confirm that features perceived as sustainable that are extracted from online reviews resonate with customers when thinking of various sustainability aspects and that the collage is an effective tool for assessing sustainability perceptions.