The Role of Design in Establishing the Culture of Conserving in Adolescents with Focus on Sustainability

This study is concern with the culture of conserving and sustainability. Many of the issues such as air pollution, water scarcity, and epidemic diseases that threaten human’s life today have root in the environmental damage. Therefore, paying attention to the environment and its related problems are very important. Not only preventing the waste of natural resources by the current generation is necessary, but also preserving the nature and its resources for next generations is our duty. As today’s children are tomorrow’s adults that will shape the path to the future society, special attention needs to be paid on educating them. In addition, the impression of learning in younger ages is long-lasting. Therefore, adolescents were chosen as the target group for this research. The aim was to encourage them to respect to the environment and learn how to save the valuable sources. The main principle of sustainable design is to establish a balance between environment, society and economy. Saving energy is a vital issue, that plays an important role in establishing this balance. The culture of conserving refers to beliefs, orders, values and behaviors that substantiate the concept of conserving. In today's modern world - more than any other time - it is crucial to raise general awareness on the importance of sustainable development. And design techniques seem to be effective and influential tools for the development of culture. For the purpose of building and developing the culture of energy saving, extensive studies regarding sustainability, culture and children as end-users were conducted. Then a field study was carried out to identify the degree of adolescents' comprehension in terms of living environment questions, understanding their mentalities and the degree of their involvement in this area. This study was performed on 150 boys and girls between 11 to 14 years old. For this aim the Brain writing creative technique was used. The relevant feed backs were analyzed statistically by using Excel software. The results demonstrated mentality of the students regarding energy saving and preserving earth resources, which could be used as a pattern for designers to obtain better understanding about the users.  Although the students did not know much about the sustainable design approach, they mentioned it several times in their ideas. In the results it was clearly observed that girls and boys had different approaches towards the problem. For example, girls did not suggest any political solutions, while boys did not refer to any emotional viewpoint. The girls’ ideas and suggestions for saving the planet came more from their subtle feelings, while the boys had a more logical views toward the subject. These small differences could be translated into very important and effective details in product design, which could lead to the production of appropriate products for each gender, age and group. Based on the students’ ideas, few concepts were generated and one was selected as the final concept, which was converted to design and was evaluated by students. The results of evaluation showed that students were satisfied and liked the designed model.