Nowadays, daily consumption routines are based on individual shaping competencies in private households, business or leisure. The daily consumption schemes become more complex, especially if social or environmental considerations come into play. Thus, consumers play a significant role in shaping a sustainable development within their daily consumption spectrum.
In this context, it becomes obvious that there is a fundamental need for a training of competencies. Further, adequate tools to screen and evaluate their individual consumption patterns are missing, thus time expenditure, living costs and resource consumption are not adequately measurable for an individual itself.
Against this background, the project will strive to explore the issues of daily action within individual consumption patterns. The research tries to examine and to design TRANSITION-roadmaps for sustainable patterns of consumption in private surroundings. This background provides following research questions:
Is there a way of encouraging consumers to find their own way and to make their own competent decisions? How to characterise patterns of consumption and action? Which criteria and environmental factors have to be considered to show which decisions can be taken?
The TRANSITION-roadmaps are going to examine and display the consumers' environment, their action ranges and manifest different ways of action to strengthen their competencies for a progressive assimilation of sustainable patterns in daily consumption routines. Thereby, the investigation focuses on resource intensive action fields such as nutrition, mobility or construction and housing.
In a first step of the project, a scientific basis will be developed with help of a "desk research". Afterwards, the results will be enhanced by expert interviews and an expert workshop. Moreover, current results of user-integrated action research will be integrated.