Sustainability by Design: How to Promote Sustainable Tourism Behavior through Persuasive Design?

Sustainable tourism has become the shift in tourism development because it is benefiting residents, tourists and the environment. Persuasion for sustainability is not relatively new, notions like “green design’’ and “green technology’’ consider changing people’s habits through persuasive system design. Starting from these facts, this thesis project aims to promote sustainable tourism through persuasive design. The method of persuasive design evaluation showed that effective persuasive designs are existing in tourism programs today to influence tourists’ behaviors. Some evaluation got bad results because people don’t understand what trigger behavior change effectively and efficiently. This thesis project aims to understand tourists’ behaviors and attitudes and find out the barriers for tourists to be green on tours. From the methods of the sustainable behavior survey and the sustainable attitude survey, the significant negative sustainable tourism behaviors and attitudes were uncovered. They were organized into 6 significant persuasion contents. From the interviews, the tourists’ barriers to perform the target sustainable behaviors were identified. In the end, the persuasive design principles were proposed specifically for sustainable tourism. At the same time, from the experiment of promoting sustainable tourism behaviors, a new persuasive design methodology and a persuasive design process were proposed.