DESIGNING AN ENVIRONMENTAL INFORMATION CHANNEL

Responding to the lack of reference literature about sustainable consumption and practical industrial designs that encourage it, this paper reviews the principles of sustainable consumption and provides a case study that proposes an application tool that incentivizes sustainable consumption. This case study is an experimental design, which concerns translating theories about sustainable consumption into practice. Based on the literature, a conceptual framework about concrete tools for incentivizing sustainable consumption is proposed. This tool will aim to bring environmental information to consumers about how to increase their sustainable consumption of products and services. The proposed tool is called Eco-Mileage System (EMS). The effectiveness of this proposal was verified by the International Business Exchange Conference’s International Design Competition, which was sponsored by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry and had the theme “Re-Think Consumption.” According to the evaluation of the experts and judges of the conference’s competition, the proposal showed positive potential for being able to incentivize sustainable consumption, and it received the Chairman of the Japan Design Foundation Prize. The possible benefits of this proposal are discussed in this paper, which will also include a consideration of how to implement it in the future.