Abstract
Current sustainable food packaging often emphasises material innovation at the expense of user behaviours role across the life cycle, creating a “sustainability paradox” where environmental gains are offset by behavioural misalignment. This study employs behavioural design theory in a two-stage investigation to examine how packaging design shapes user behaviour. Field research at Xiangtan Universitys snack street identified user challenges for four food packaging categories: ready-to-eat dry food, ready-to-eat wet food, non-ready-to-eat dry food, and non-ready-to-eat wet food, and corresponding behaviours were extracted for each type of food packaging. In Stage 2, two comparative experiments (traditional packaging versus design-guided intervention) involved 10 participants per group completing tasks, evaluated through behavioural observation and the System Usability Scale. The results reveal a cognitive mismatch between designer intent and user perception: Group B’s ergonomic arc-shaped handle, which aligns with user behavioural habits, achieved a 90% success rate in tasks such as handling and recycling, whereas Group A’s “four-finger imitation” handle, limited by unclear visual cues, attained only a 10% success rate. SUS scores indicated significantly lower learn ability in the behavioural guidance design group (Experiment A: 50 versus 94.17 for the control). These findings underscore that user behavioural habits are the primary determinant of packaging sustainability, rendering material innovation alone insufficient. An implicit design-behaviour interaction mechanism is crucial to address this challenge. By moving beyond a material-focused design approach, this study proposes a bidirectional behaviour-design optimization framework, providing actionable guidance for plastic reduction initiatives in campus environments and similar contexts.
Keywords
Sustainable design; Take-out food packaging; Behavioural design; User behaviour habits
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.350
Citation
Luo, X., Deng, Q., Huang, Q., Wang, Y.,and Li, J.(2025) The Bidirectional Relationship Between Behavioural Guidance Design and User Behaviour Habits: Implications for Sustainable Packaging, in Chang, C.-Y., and Hsu, Y. (eds.), IASDR 2025: Design Next, 02-05 December, Taiwan. https://doi.org/10.21606/iasdr.2025.350
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Track 8 - Circular/Sustainable Design
The Bidirectional Relationship Between Behavioural Guidance Design and User Behaviour Habits: Implications for Sustainable Packaging
Current sustainable food packaging often emphasises material innovation at the expense of user behaviours role across the life cycle, creating a “sustainability paradox” where environmental gains are offset by behavioural misalignment. This study employs behavioural design theory in a two-stage investigation to examine how packaging design shapes user behaviour. Field research at Xiangtan Universitys snack street identified user challenges for four food packaging categories: ready-to-eat dry food, ready-to-eat wet food, non-ready-to-eat dry food, and non-ready-to-eat wet food, and corresponding behaviours were extracted for each type of food packaging. In Stage 2, two comparative experiments (traditional packaging versus design-guided intervention) involved 10 participants per group completing tasks, evaluated through behavioural observation and the System Usability Scale. The results reveal a cognitive mismatch between designer intent and user perception: Group B’s ergonomic arc-shaped handle, which aligns with user behavioural habits, achieved a 90% success rate in tasks such as handling and recycling, whereas Group A’s “four-finger imitation” handle, limited by unclear visual cues, attained only a 10% success rate. SUS scores indicated significantly lower learn ability in the behavioural guidance design group (Experiment A: 50 versus 94.17 for the control). These findings underscore that user behavioural habits are the primary determinant of packaging sustainability, rendering material innovation alone insufficient. An implicit design-behaviour interaction mechanism is crucial to address this challenge. By moving beyond a material-focused design approach, this study proposes a bidirectional behaviour-design optimization framework, providing actionable guidance for plastic reduction initiatives in campus environments and similar contexts.