DOI: 10.14457/tu.the.2019.1164
title: Platform design to promote the sustainable material-sharing in circular economy in Bangkok, Thailand

description: Furniture and home decoration waste always consume energy and space when transport to landfill sites. Also, there is an unclear plan for sustainability in sharing or reducing the leftover furniture and home decoration in Thailand. As a consequence, this study aims to investigate how a sustainable platform can be created to share leftover furniture and decoration by integrating key success factors of a sustainable sharing platform and provide a guideline to design a sustainable sharing platform by using sharing leftover furniture and decoration as a case study. The study uses the double diamond process as a core framework. The key success factors of the sharing platform and sustainable practices were captured and defined by the literature reviewing method, which can be summarised as 1) The platform should contain features that encourage and balance all of the 3 pillars of sustainability as a driving factor for achieving true sustainability. 2) Attitude and background knowledge toward waste management, the informing period, and the emotion of “Ownership” are driving factors to achieve sustainable-sharing practices. 3) The user interface and user experience of the platform must be designed to best respond to the objectives of the platform and to the user expected desires. The factors were included to process the design brief which results in sharing, content and connect features. The first prototype of the platform was designed by the 3 main features and was randomly tested with the potential users aged between 20-64 years old and living in the area of the Bangkok metropolitan region by using the random sampling method. The test was conducted using an online survey and in-depth interviews to collect the data. The result from 406 respondents showed that most of the respondents were interested in using this platform. However, there is some noticed awareness of the eagerness of using the sharing feature. The eagerness in sharing was affected by the concern of trust and credibility such as quality control of the shared-furniture and the quality of users and service providers in the platform. The second prototype was created as an improved version and was tested in an in-depth interview with 10 interviewees randomly selected from the respondents from the previous online questionnaire. The impact level of the platform performance was assessed by the interviewees which result as listed. From the full score of 3, the design, business and technology aspects result as 2.6, 2.6 and 2.6 respectively. For the assessment of the 3 pillars of sustainability performance, the results are 2.6 for the social aspect, 2.3 for the economic aspect and 2.7 for the environmental aspect. In conclusion, the research can be concluded as 1) The objectives of this research are archived and the design guideline of a sustainable sharing platform is the overall process of this research which is expected to help create any sustainable platform for other kinds of sharing in the future and supporting the sustainability and innovation in the future city. 2) The result of the research reveals the insight that although the 3 main functions are successful in terms of assessment score. The basic elements and the details of the functions and sub-features in the platform are needed to be clarified more to be succeeded in terms of fulfilling the user requirement to increase the potential of user engagement in the platform.