Designing city installations for socially and environmentally responsible behavior

As a result of global climate change, financial crisis, and the public perception of massive overconsumption, designers are increasingly motivated “to do good for society”. In this paper, city installations are considered as good opportunities to connect with public and raise their awareness to sustainability. This is while responsible design and sustainability rarely are the focal points of designing street furniture. The conventional goal of sustainable design initially was to design products that require the least energy to be produced and used and that could be recycled. Currently, the idea of sustainable design is growing to have some type of a higher calling, which may be social responsibility and a public design. This becomes more important in developing countries like Iran, which sustainable issues are still not a public concern. This paper presents a design case study at Art university of Isfahan, Iran, which explores how designers and design educators can set their own holistic approach to sustainability in new product development, place social awareness, responsibility and behavior in perspective. The experiment consists of practices for designing city installations which are not neutral but a deliberate means to promote different levels of sustainability. The proposed design interventions through the conducted experiment are presented and analyzed with their level of success for implementing different levels of sustainable design from eco-design, to raise public awareness of sustainability, sensate or educate people, and cause sustainable behavior through one of the design strategies of coercive, decisive, persuasive, or seductive. © 2018 The Authors. Published by Diamond Congress Ltd. Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the Creative Construction Conference 2018.