Burning for sustainable behaviour

For many products there is a substantial potential for reducing environmental impacts by altering the way people interact with them. The current work investigates the potential for improving the way people interact with woodstoves, thereby reducing the environmental impact resulting from burning firewood, by adjusting the design of the woodstove. This paper describes a complete user centred design for sustainable behaviour process, from initial ethnographic studies, through the design process, to a comparative testing of a prototype and a regular woodstove, monitoring emissions and user behaviour. The test indicates that the prototype is used much more in line with the recommendations and emits fewer fine particles than the conventional stove.