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Western consumption patterns are strongly associated with environmental pollution and climate change, which challenges us with transforming our society and consumption towards a sustainable future. This thesis takes up this challenge and aims to contribute to this debate at the intersection of ICT artifacts and social practices through the examples of food and mobility consumption. The social practice lens is employed as an alternative to the predominant persuasive or motivational lens of design in the respective consumption domains. Against this background, this thesis first presents three research papers that contribute to a broader understanding of dynamic practices and their transformation towards a sustainable stable state. The following research takes up these sections' empirical results that more intensely focus on the appropriation of materials and infrastructures utilizing Recommender Systems. Given this approach, this thesis contributes to three fields - practice-based Computing, Recommender Systems, and Consumer Informatics.
Vehicle emissions have been identified as a cause of air pollution and one of the major reasons why air quality in many large German cities such as Berlin, Bonn, Hamburg, Cologne or Munich does not meet EU-wide limits. As a result, in the recent past, judicial driving bans on diesel vehicles have been imposed in many places since those vehicles emit critical pollutant groups. For the increasing urban population, the challenge is whether and how a change of the modal split in favor of the more environmentally and climate-friendly public transport can be achieved.
This paper presents the case of the Federal City of Bonn, one of five model cities sponsored by the German federal government that are testing measures to reduce traffic-related pollutant emissions by expanding the range of public transport services on offer. We present the results of a quantitative survey (N = 14,296) performed in the Bonn/Rhein-Sieg area and the neighboring municipalities as well as the ensuing logistic regressions confirming that a change in individual mobility behavior in favor of public transport is possible through expanding services. Our results show that individual traffic could be reduced, especially on the city's main traffic axes. To sustainably improve air quality, such services must be made permanently available.