Encouraging sustainable cleaning In childcare through participatory design

This paper reports on an example of the use of participatory design to develop behavior change communications in respect of sustainability. It concerns design work for the 2007 Safe and Sustainable Indoor Cleaning project (SASI Clean), a government-funded study into low-chemical cleaning in Victorian childcare. Relevant authorities accept such practices as effective for cleaning, but many centres use harsh proprietary chemicals that impact on the environment and health, suggesting information alone is inadequate in influencing attitudes and behaviour. In the SASI Clean study, participatory design merged designers' visual communication skills with childcare workers' insights into the communication context to develop targeted information materials to encourage the use of sustainable cleaning practices. Our example represents participatory design as an innovative technique for harnessing people's creative ideas to the specificity of the communication task; the scale of current environmental problems demanding responses pitched at the macro and micro levels and observing the need for trust in information and consideration of people's perspectives. The paper uses a case study approach to enable an exploration of the complex human and organisational issues associated with the project.