Why does it matter?
The origins of the Linear Economy – the ‘take-make-use-dispose’ model of consumption – date from the Industrial Revolution and the global economy developed around this model. Today various social, economic and environmental factors mean that it is no longer sustainable. The scale of what we’re designing has shifted from products to companies, to economic systems. Who we’re designing for has expanded from a solitary user to an intimately connected web of people, spanning the globe. New TOOLS such as AI and IOT mean our design ambitions are limited only by our abilities to use them. A new model – the Circular Economy (CE) is being advocated, but as yet it is not widely practiced. Businesses built around long-life products and recovered resources cannot operate without products/services that support the regenerative strategy. For companies, changes in the business model result in the need for product/service design, which contrasts starkly to those for the linear economy throw-away products. In CE, when waste is no longer an option, the role of design is growing exponentially. Circular Design (CD) is defined as the CE engine – the activity aimed to create product integrity. Nevertheless, the development of products according to the CD principles (especially on the product level) is not sufficiently studied. There is a need for TOOLS based on CD (practical and methodological) which respond to the complexity of CE and helps to develop products/services based on CE model. Until now, the studies concentrate mostly on Eco-design, which is dealing with the improvement of technical parameters, but not often the attention is dedicated
to Circular Design and its potential for CE.
Period of project implementation: 2020 – 2023 (for more information see here).