Strategic questions: Exploring circular opportunities in your context
Systems level
How will you contribute to flourishing and thriving? What is your ecosystem?
Value
- What is valuable and ‘nutritious’? How could your products/parts/particles become nutritious in the ecosystem? How can you enable flows of these nutrients within the ecosystem to meet the needs of stakeholders and life-forms better?
- What is your value creation and circulation? What if you decoupled your economic activities from material streams even further?
Shifting towards experiences (combined with your core product): What is the real underlying need? How might you address the underlying need decoupled from linear material flows and selling products?
Partnerships
- What partners could help you create new value ecosystems? What partners could close an important gap in the value creation, reverse logistics, etc.
(Reverse) Logistics
- Aggregation and collaboration: Reverse logistics channels and partnerships?
- Getting your products back decentrally: Who already has access and contact points with your customers?
- Where do we need standards and alignment in terms of ‘unified’ infrastructure? Example London Boroughs: It doesn’t make sense that every borough has their own collection scheme. Example plastics: It makes sense to align on a smaller set of materials/re-processing infrastructure and then innovate products ‘on top of that’. Similar to the internet protocol: We align on the standard/the foundation, and then companies can innovate on top of that.
- Where do you collaborate with others to build collection, reverse logistics channels and reprocessing infrastructure, and where do you build it yourself?
- Is decentralised reprocessing in different geographic centres possible, rather than shipping it all a long way to one centre?
Embedding intelligence
- How can every cycle/return of a product create a feedback loop and improve the design for the next cycle?
- What information is flowing back? The actual wear. Information through scanning the QR Code. The explicit feedback given by customers.
- Could you use these feedback loops and the fact that you know your customers better to offer ‘tailored’ solutions to your customers?
- How might we make our design more resilient for the interconnected world? How might we collaborate with, and get feedback from the ecosystem - in the design stage - to “future-proof” our solution? How might we prototype and co-create our solutions with various stakeholders rather than only with the ‘end users’?
- How does this solution fit into the value chain and broader ecosystem? What about the needs of various stakeholders that are in touch with the materials along the way? Instead of focusing only on a narrow ‘end user’ and her needs (the role of empathy in design thinking), circular design recognises the need to co-create and prototype design solutions with stakeholders across the value chain. Otherwise, solutions might be fit for the narrow end user but not the ecosystem and cause unintended consequences. These consequences (for example, leakage of packaging into oceans) negatively affect not only the economy and society but also their creators (e.g. activism against the brands and designers of the packaging).
- How can you share information about your products and materials with people ‘after use’, such that the materials are ‘nutritious’ and useful to them and can be brought back into useful incarnations and the next lifeform/products? Example: Material passports for buildings that share information about the composition and purity of components and materials.
Systems change
- How might systems thinking help you identify intervention points?
Product level
Materials and components
- How can we keep biological and technical material cycles separate?
- How might we keep the purity and value of individual parts/components as high as possible?
- What happens to the materials after use (not theoretically but in practice)? How might we better understand the actual flows of products and materials in our ecosystem?
- How can we make material choices that are suitable for circular flows in our given (local) ecosystems? Could we shift towards locally abundant regenerative materials (see: Materiom)?
- Is a physical object required in the first place? How might we decouple our design from material flows through a better understanding of the underlying user needs, dematerialisation etc.?
- This includes designing services and experiences that meet the needs instead of focusing the design solution purely on materialistic aspects such as selling more physical products that may be underutilised and become waste after a short use phase
- How might we reduce the amount of different material streams?
Emotional durability
- How might we enable a deeper connection and love, increasing the how long our product actually stays in use (not just theoretical durability but actual use phase)
- How might we allow people to ‘tailor’ and personalise their products - thereby increasing emotional durability and love for their products? How can accessories modify ‘timeless’ products and help them evolve? Example: How can accessories make timeless clothing more adaptable to evolving tastes, fashion cycles, etc., rather than replacing the whole product every time?
3D design and evolution
- How might we achieve the required functionality of a physical object through 3D arrangement instead of chemistry?
- Inspiration: Nature uses a small number of chemical building blocks and achieves a broad range of functionalities and colours through 3D arrangement. The butterfly’s colours are not created by using different chemicals but by intelligent arrangement of the same building blocks on a nano-level into a 3D structure. This allows nature to decompose the butterfly when it dies and use all building blocks again
- Example: 3D printing of renewable materials to achieve the required function and material properties instead of using increasingly complex composites and multilayers that become waste after a short use phase and are no longer of any value
- How might we design for disassembly to increase the value of products, parts and materials after use? How might we use modularity as a strategy to tailor the design solution to multiple user needs while allowing for replacement and remanufacturing of the physical parts that have the highest deterioration (example: STRATA furniture with replaceable surface layers and durable underlying structures)?
- How might we use our creativity in the interaction and context design?
- This includes understanding how designing the 3D object and the context influences usage patterns in line with the circular economy principles.
- How might we build in “possibilities” to evolve and modify the design as stakeholders along the value chain get in touch with it, thereby increasing utilisation for them and enabling feedback loops?
- Ask Nature: How does nature design and address your challenge? See: AskNature.org
Principles
- Keep biological and technical materials separate
- Keep the purity of materials as high as possible
- Design for separation and modularity: Screws not glues
- Design with the (after-use) infrastructure in mind. Ensure your creations are compatible with the technologies and infrastructure that are present in the geographies where your products end up
- Prioritise inner loops (like reuse) over outer loops (like recycling)
- Involve a broader set of stakeholders in the co-creation - go beyond a narrow ‘end user’ to future-proof your creation and avoid waste