Beginning as an artistic expression, a project for an environmental design course unexpectedly guided Erin MacDonald to the focus of her research. The project was assigned her first year of graduate school at the University of Michigan, and MacDonald decided to develop an “installation,” a work of art that places different materials in a large space to provoke thought and elicit strong responses from viewers.
MacDonald’s installation featured a model of an apartment that included a coffee table with tree trunks for legs, a cell phone and charger lying atop a pile of coal, and an oil rig next to a light switch. The artwork, she says, represented the natural resources consumed by man-made objects and attempted to align viewers’ perceptions with realities of the environmental impact of consumer goods.
MacDonald thought the installation might inspire her to adopt a more sustainable lifestyle by bringing environmental impacts front-and-center but instead found the piece depressing and overwhelming. That’s when she began exploring the factors that influence people’s decisions to purchase environmentally friendly products.
Feelings inform purchasing decisions
An assistant professor of mechanical engineering with a courtesy appointment in the College of Design and the Michael and Denise Mack 2050 Challenge Scholar, MacDonald takes an interdisciplinary approach to understanding consumers’ thoughts and perceptions. Integrating engineering and psychology, her work emphasizes the significant impact context has on determining consumer preference, a factor that at times, she notes, even outweighs the product’s actual capabilities.
Emotions have an especially strong influence when making decisions to purchase “green” merchandise. Consumers, MacDonald notes, have to trust in the products and believe in the social good that comes from their use before they will accept—let alone demand—sustainable products.
“Without demand, even the best engineered goods may not last in the market,” she says. “That’s why recognizing there are both fundamental engineering decisions and psychological human decisions involved in developing and marketing sustainable products is so important.”
Collecting consumer data
Because of the multiple factors that go into consumer decisions, measuring preferences is a complex process. For example, MacDonald recently compared how different populations perceive paper towels made with recycled content through experiments at a computer station.
“The social desirability of using recycled products was so strong that a good portion of the subjects in the experiment refused to buy towels without recycled content, even though they did not currently buy recycled paper towels or know how much recycled paper their current brand had,” MacDonald explains.
Whether or not the product actually worked was not the most important factor, McDonald observes. And though the consumer urge to do the right thing made it challenging for her to measure customer preference for sustainable products in an experimental context, it did lead to other important conclusions.
MacDonald found, for instance, that people associate quilted lines on paper towels with absorbency. With findings like these, she says, engineers can design a product that communicates its quality to the customer, resulting in greater sales of a product that is also better for the environment.
Sustainability meets practicality
Keeping a scientific standard of sustainability in mind, MacDonald designed an umbrella called the Crayella. The umbrella, which won the Treehugger.com and I.D. Magazine Umbrella Inside Out competition, is made of recycled polypropylene and aluminum. The design contains half the components of a regular umbrella, creates no waste fabric scraps, and requires no chemical waterproofing processes. Also, one of the more sustainable features of the umbrella design is that it encourages the “upcycling” or reuse of broken frame components to create new umbrellas.
MacDonald’s ultimate research goal is to understand how to get consumers to evaluate sustainable products on multiple levels, considering factors such as the overall process she proposed for the Crayella.
“While including recycled content in a product is a good start, a product’s overall sustainability is evaluated from production to disposal,” she says. “If we can get consumers looking at the big picture, to understand life-cycle impact, we can have wider-spread use of truly sustainable products.”