Lifestyle design method by backcasting and its potential for innovation

It is important that we gain an affluent lifestyle with technologies that cause a lower burden on the environment because of increasing environmental restrictions in the future. We need to change drastically our own lifestyle because individuals are the smallest unit for the excessive expansion of human activities. In this paper, we developed a lifestyle design method using backcasting as a part of a nature technology innovation system. The nature technology innovation system consists of four parts, 'Designing lifestyle', 'Identifying technology', 'Asking nature', and 'Redesigning technology'. This empirical study of more than 1500 cases identify the key factors for designing lifestyles by business persons and show one example of innovation by Tohoku University using the lifestyle design method. We suggest that the lifestyle design method using backcasting is useful for companies to develop new products which make the users change their lifestyles towards a lower environmental burden.