Digital tools to guide choice towards more sustainable consumption: proposing a question instrument to evaluate their design, ethics, and legitimacy

Sustainable consumption decision-making is frequently time-intensive and requires a high degree of engagement. Choices, however, can be influenced through a choice architecture including editing, sign-posting and recommending. Digital consumption assistants online promise to simplify choice, but the mechanisms, ethics, and the legitimacy with which they edit choices have remained underexplored. This paper draws together different strands of literature from ethical consumption, geography, behavioural economics, philosophy and environmental sociology, to link previously unconnected concerns including production ethics, consumption ethics, evidence reliability, greenwashing protection, transparency, regulation, user sovereignty, inclusivity and facilitation of collective action. We propose a 12-point question instrument covering these aspects, to be used to systematically analyse different digital ethical consumption tools. The new instrument is applied to two case studies, ethicalconsumer.org (UK) and Green Consumption Assistant (Germany). We find trade-offs between user sovereignty and time saving, divergent funding models and inclusion. The paper (1) identifies customisation as a key design principle to balance convenience and user sovereignty, (2) highlights repeat purchase assistance and user-configured choice filters as promising features, and (3) calls for transparency and user engagement in design to deliver on legitimacy.