Editorial : special issue on design and social practice theory : a promising dialogue for sustainable living

The drive for ‘behaviour change’ dominates public discourse on sustainability. Design is implicated by supplying ‘sustainable’ products intended to covertly influence users to enact more sustainable behaviours – such as saving water or energy – or by supplying overt ‘educational’ messages about what people should be doing differently. More often than not, sustainable designs are unpractised – emerging from problem contexts where people are conceived primarily as biomechanical entities, albeit desiring ones. From this perspective, the concept of ‘behaviour’ can be seen as highly individualised and radically disarticulated from the actual contexts of everyday life. Social practice theories challenge the change agency of ‘behaviour’ by offering a more nuanced picture of what holds everyday practices together. They offer an alternative way of understanding unsustainable practices by demonstrating that ‘wants’ emerge from social practices, rather than the other way around (Warde, 2005). More broadly, they reframe the scope of design as implicated in the generation and persistence of more sustainable everyday practices, by helping to reveal how design constrains people to continue practicing in certain ways. Social practices are complex rhythmic entities composed of human actors, material infrastructures, and social conventions enmeshed with histories, imaginaries, geographical, cultural and political contexts. Understanding practices as situated and social-material in nature presents a rich field of possibilities for design interventions to support change beyond the supply of products, and prompts a reinterpreting of design beyond reductively technical, ‘creationist’ or material conceptions (Ingram et al., 2007; Mellick Lopes et al., 2012).