Influenced by Design—How Design Cues Can Shape Sustainable Design and Evaluation Choices

Digital technologies play a dual role in sustainability transitions: they can enable more sustainable practices while simultaneously reinforcing unsustainable patterns of use. Although design is increasingly recognized as a critical lever for steering sustainability-oriented behavior, little is known about how users perceive and prioritize sustainability design cues when these compete with functional, performance-oriented, and hedonic cues. Thus, this study examines how digital design cues shape sustainability-oriented decision-making by analyzing participatory design data from 18 sustainability-focused workshops with secondary-school students. Drawing on an affordance-based analytical lens, we conducted an affordance-oriented qualitative content analysis of 109 digital product concepts and 374 peer evaluation statements using an iterative coding procedure to identify sustainability affordances and competing affordances and examine how they are prioritized during evaluative judgments of digital product concepts. The findings reveal distinct context-dependent shifts in affordance salience. While sustainability affordances were most prominent in prototype concepts, where they accounted for 58% of all sustainability-related codes, they declined to 32% in positive evaluations and 10% in negative evaluations. Conversely, functional and performance affordances gained prominence during evaluative judgments. These patterns indicate that affordance salience varies across contexts and help explain why sustainability considerations may become less salient in evaluative decision settings. Interpreting these patterns through the concept of affordance competition, the study shows how multiple perceived action possibilities simultaneously compete for attention. By applying an affordance-based perspective to digital sustainability, the study contributes to research on sustainability-oriented design by highlighting how competing affordances shape the visibility and evaluation of sustainability considerations across different contexts. The findings offer practical implications for designing digital artifacts that make sustainability affordances more visible, meaningful, and competitive in everyday decision contexts, particularly for future generations of users.