Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Integration Of Biomimicry Into A Built Environment Design Process Model: An Alternative Approach Towards Hydro-Infrastructure, Timothy Lee Albertson

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

Current methods and processes that support the planning, design and construction of a sustainable built environment include ambiguous principles (Roseland 2000), lack feedback loops (Van Bueren and Jong 2007) and lack a common language between disciplines (Brandon et al 1997). As a result of 3.8 billion years of "research and development" (evolution), nature provides a set of design blueprints that may be used to guide us to create elegant, sustainable, and innovative designs for human technologies (Benyus 1997). The field of biomimicry analyzes nature's best ideas and adapts them for human use (Benyus 1997). The built environment could benefit from …

Toward A Policy Framework For The Design Of Economic Information Packages, Andrew Whitmore

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

The emergence of product certifications such as "organic," "fair trade" and "shade grown" has gone far to introduce non-price related product information back into the consumer decision making process thereby reducing information asymmetries and improving market outcomes. Recently, these certifications have been supplemented by the emergence of several web-based consumer decision support systems that are designed to disseminate non-price product information to consumers. Like printed product labels, these new web-based systems present the same informational cues to each consumer regardless of his or her preference for the information and they rate products with fixed weights that are not customized to …

Building Sustainable Societies: Exploring Sustainability Policy And Practice In The Age Of High Consumption, Cindy Isenhour

University of Kentucky Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation is an attempt to examine how humans in wealthy, post-industrial urban contexts understand sustainability and respond to their concerns given their sphere of influence. I focus specifically on sustainable consumption policy and practice in Sweden, where concerns for sustainability and consumer-based responses are strong. This case raises interesting questions about the relative strength of sustainability movements in different cultural and geo-political contexts as well as the specific factors that have motivated the movement toward sustainable living in Sweden.

The data presented here supports the need for multigenic theories of sustainable consumerism. Rather than relying on dominant theories of …