This article originally appeared on Circulate News.
When you think of design, what images come to mind? If you visited a design museum recently, you might consider a nice chair, a resourceful backpack, or a futuristic-looking car. Most likely you think that you are mostly tangible. With a bit of luck, or for example, assuming you’re familiar with the concept of a circular economy, your idea of design might also include services, such as rental schemes or a maintenance contract. Despite this, over the past decades, industrial design has been expanding to include wider scales, such as organizations and neighborhoods. This development occurred because designers sought to apply their skills to increasingly complex problems, such as environmental degradation and poverty, that usually required a systematic approach. The same goes for achieving a circular economy, whether it’s within a city, a country, or globally. The wide range of skills and styles that designers possess today can greatly contribute to this endeavour.
Searching for the seed of designers’ interest in broader societal problems, one soon comes across the work of Victor Papanik, an Austrian-American designer. In 1971, he wrote his seminal book, “Designing for the Real World” in which he exposed the environmental impact of design. “There are professions more harmful than industrial design, but only a few,” he says in the first line. “And there is probably only one profession more vocal. Advertising design, in persuading people to buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have to impress others who don’t care, is probably the most vocal field in existence today. Industrial design, by Fabricating the vulgar follies stirred up by the advertisers, in second place.”
Jotte de Koning, an assistant professor at Delft University of Technology, remembers feeling betrayed when she first read Design for the Real World when she was a sophomore in industrial design. “I wanted to do good, to make the world a better place, and here he is telling me I chose the second worst field of work in this regard.” However, Papanik’s book also suggested a way forward by introducing ideas such as environmental design and social design. “By the end of the book, I felt like there was a way out,” de Kooning says.
The best-designed product will still be discarded in the end unless it is accompanied by an easy path to a new use cycle.
In a much more recent publication, two design researchers, Fabrizio Sechin and Idil Gaziolosoy, provide an overview of the many strategies designers have come up with since Papanik’s book to address these problems. They identified four levels of innovation developed over time, each taking a broader system perspective than the previous.
The first level is product design. Designers began looking for ways to make products less harmful: removing some of the toxic chemicals here, using less of the material there… Despite this, designers soon began to take a full life cycle perspective, where you think not only of the impact of making the product but Also the effects resulting from its use, transportation and disposal. This broader perspective opened the door to more circular models. Making a product, such as a glass bottle, that is already a little heavier may be best if it means you can reuse it multiple times.
The designers also explored the impact the product could have on user behaviors, such as their compliance with certain rules or potential rebound effects, for example when people increase the temperature in their homes once they switch to more efficient heating. They have developed several approaches to design these behavioral changes.
Once options such as reuse were considered, the designers had to expand their work beyond the product itself. The best-designed product will eventually continue to be phased out unless it is accompanied by an easy path toward a new use cycle, for example with the right service or business model. This can be, for example, a deposit or a rental scheme. Designers’ skills are highly valued here too, as they are trained to put the user at the center of their thinking. Through this expansion of scope, design has entered the second level: product service systems.
The third level is what Ceschin and Gaziulosoy call social spatial systems innovation, which takes social and local context into account in the design. Industrial symbiosis provides an example of innovation at this level, where waste from one industrial process can become an input into another industrial process. A few case studies are well known in the context of the circular economy, notably the Kalundborg industrial complex in Denmark, but little emphasis is given to the role that designers can play in these initiatives. There are a number of tools at their disposal, such as visualizations for mapping actors and resource flows as well as models for simulating inputs and outputs of materials within a given geographic area.
Designers do their best when they can attack the problem from the start and engage with stakeholders all the time.
The sociospatial level is also an area of social innovation, which complements technological innovation when addressing environmental and social issues. Examples of social innovation, such as community gardens or in-neighbourhood tool-sharing schemes, are often driven by the communities themselves, sometimes in collaboration with activists or political leaders. Professional designers can also play a major role here by making these innovations more effective, attractive and visible as well as helping them scale.
The fourth and final level of sustainable design according to Ceschin and Gaziulusoy is the social and technical system, in which complex social and technical systems, such as a city or region, are intertwined. At this level, designers aim to drive the profound societal shifts – or “transformations” – that are needed if we are to address complex challenges such as climate change or rising inequality. When it comes to the circular economy, we get into a range of projects typically associated with governments, such as urban planning and regional development. Here, too, the designers’ skills proved relevant. Over time, they have devised techniques for dealing with such complex systems, for example, visualization methods that adopt diverse perspectives, experience-based approaches such as live labs, participatory processes to bring all stakeholders together, or vision methods.
This growing scope of design has largely led to the growing trend of design thinking, which is sometimes misinterpreted as indicating that everyone can and should become a designer. Many disciplines, skills, and knowledge are needed to achieve societal changes, many of which do not fall within the primary scope of design, such as policy making, psychology, or data science. However, I can’t think of an ambitious circular economy project that wouldn’t benefit from a design perspective.
If you are an entrepreneur or policy maker trying to make your company or region more circular, you may want to consider hiring a trained designer, and not just focus on specific products and services. Their skills can help you deal with broader systemic issues more effectively. “It is important to bring designers in early in the project,” notes Jotte de Koning. “Often, designers are hired after several discussions have already taken place and the scope has been optimized. Designers do their best when they can tackle the problem from the start and communicate with stakeholders all the time.” Even if hiring a designer isn’t an option, learning about design, its processes, mindset, and a wide range of approaches, can help you make better decisions.