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This handbook aims at facilitating the design and development process of leather products and informing the people working within those processes. They are not intented as formulas to be simply followed in order to create “sustainable products”. Instead, the overall goal of this handbook is to broaden the scope of designers, marketers, product managers and all other parties involved in creating new leather products. Leather productsare usually embedded in a complex and diffuse system that makes it very difficult to design them “more sustainable”. In order to do so, a systemic perspective is needed that takes a wide variety of aspects and interrelations into account that sometimes contradict each other. Therefore, in the case of leather products, design for sustainable development might often be an
iterative process involving compromises and uncertainties and requires
a constant re-evaluation of design decisions and systemic effects. This handbook is therefore intended to contribute to a capacity-building process through which design and development processes become more systemic, leading towards more sustainable products.
The leather industry is a complex system with multiple actors that faces a fundamental transition toward more sustainable chemistry. To support this process, this article analyzes challenges of the industry and consumers’ roles as a nexus of transition-relevant developments. We present findings of an empirical study (N = 439) among consumers on their perception of leather, related knowledge, and purchasing behavior. We found that participants perceived leather as natural, robust, and of high quality. Knowledge about the manufacturing of leather products was overall limited but varied. Applying a psychological behavior theory, we found that being aware of environmental and health consequences from conventional manufacturing of leather products was positively associated with a personal norm to purchase leather products that are less harmful to environment and health. The perceived ease of buying such products was positively associated with their purchase. Our findings shed light on consumers’ roles in the current leather system and their support of niche innovations toward more sustainable chemistry. Against this backdrop, we discuss implications for product design, consumer information, and needs for traceability along supply chains.
The Leather Product Design Canvas makes use of a conceptual and graphical structure comprising content boxes and specific impulse questions to raise awareness and guide design processes. It aims at supporting the product development and design process of leather products to create more sustainable products. This shall be achieved by providing a quick and multi-perspective overview of relevant topics and considerations. One reason for this approach is that in many cases the designers of leather products such as shoes or bags do not necessarily need to be leather experts. Even interdisciplinary design teams might not include experts that understand both issues of sustainable development and material properties of this versatile material.
Moreover, the complexity of the material leather and its various types of application would usually require a number of different experts to cover the most relevant topics related to sustainable development in order to identify possible rebound effects and systemic interdependencies of certain design decisions. The herewith presented canvas does by no means compensate for these expertise but aims at empowering design teams to take first steps towards more sustainable leather products based on a broadened scope while identifying knowledge gaps or the need for specific experts to be consulted or included in the design team.
A growing body of literature mainly in the context of consumer research indicates that the formal-aesthetic and conceptual design of objects can influence users' thoughts, emotions and even behavioural patterns. While there is strong evidence regarding these effects on actual purchasing decisions, evidence on the effect of aesthetic design features (e.g., haptics, colour) on health-related mental concepts and intentions for health behaviour change is scarce. Based on insights from material and conceptual priming, this article illustrates the research-driven and evidence-based design process of two design primes and comprises pre-tests and an experiment in two settings on the effect of design on health behaviour focusing i.a. on intention for health behaviour change. In an evidence-based and research-driven process, two lecterns were designed to work as primes, i.e., to have a positive vs. negative influence on several mental constructs (sense of control, sense of coherence, resiliency, self-efficacy) and health-related intention. The lecterns differed mainly in terms of aesthetic appearance (e.g., material, colour, proportion, steadiness). They were tested in (a.) a university setting with students (n = 83) and (b.) a clinical setting with orthopaedic rehabilitation patients (n = 38). Participants were asked to perform an unrelated task (evaluation of an unrelated product) while standing at and using the lecterns. Overall, t-tests and Mann-Whitney-U tests show no significant differences but differing tendencies in a mentioning task. When asked to name health-promoting activities, in the clinical setting, participants using the "positive" prime (i.e., the steady lectern, n = 13) mentioned more sport-related aspects on average and a higher portion of sport-related aspects of their answers than participants using the "negative" prime (n = 11). In the university setting (positive: n = 36; negative n = 38), no such differences emerged. This finding gives reason to believe that the prime might be specifically effective in the clinical setting as it relates to physical activity being the most relevant topic of the patients' pathology.