Themes of a Research Agenda for Sustainable Human Centred Design

The synergies and the relevant interdisciplinary existing between Sustainability and Ergonomics (HFE) are paramount to document the cultural evolution of design interventions that can be made when creating innovative artefacts, such as products, services, and product-service systems, since both disciplines aim at investigating the interactions between humans and living ecosystems. However, studies linking Sustainability and HFE mainly tackle the problems at the macro-scales, though several interplays between human behaviours, creative practices, and contexts of use can be identified at the micro-scales within the Human Centred Design domain (HCD). Ergonomic interventions performed under the Sustainability domain should employ design-driven strategies, which means that there is the need to further investigate the interdisciplinary contributions under a HCD lens (e.g.: investigations made at the human dimension). A research agenda for future explorations on Sustainable HCD is proposed in this work. The agenda is composed by six main research themes that employ design-driven scenarios to frame the complex set of open research topics pointed out by HFE in relation to Sustainability goals. Results achieved in this study set a body of knowledge through which systematically explore the possible contributions that Sustainable HCD may produce at all design scales, and for which a choral research effort is needed of all HFE community.