Design for Circularity: 3 Principles for Success
Having worked in sustainable and circular design for over two decades, I’ve seen the landscape shift significantly over the last 6–12 months. There is a maturation that is underway, whereby the techniques and strategies built over the last 3–4 decades have expanded to include full-systems transformation and reinforce the critical role that designers play in the development of sustainable and circular products to meet the new regulatory climate and business landscape.
One significant improvement has been the introduction of the new ISO Circular Economy Standards (released in May 2024), which provide references and approaches to legitimizing the practice of circular transformation. The EU has also forged ahead with some game-changing regulations that will forever affect the way products are designed and produced. Two significant ones are the new Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation and the Packaging and Packaging Waste Regulation, designers and product producers will need to dramatically alter the way products and services are created and delivered into the EU market as a result of the broad rules that apply to the full life cycle of products and packaging. In addition, there are stricter rules of green marketing claims and the ESG reporting requirements outlined in the Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive.
Building on the great work of past contributors to ecodesign, design for sustainability, life cycle thinking, industrial symbiosis, product systems service models, cleaner production and systems thinking, we are now entering a new era whereby the maturity and demands of circular design as a practice need to be redefined to meet the sophistication of the market. In this article, I’ll unpack the full systems approach to circular design and explain the three principles that support it:
- A central focus on systems thinking
- Exploration of the full spectrum of life cycle impacts
- Design for cultural and behavioral shifts
What is Design for Circularity?
There has long been a set of design for sustainability strategies that enable product producers to consider efficiency gains and impact reduction strategies. These include such approaches as dematerialization, modality, reuse, remanufacturing, disassembly, product as service models, etc. Many of these form the hierarchy of circular actions that businesses and designers can take in order to actively reduce the overall environmental impacts of their products. The significant difference is that in using a Design for Circularity (DfC) approach outlined in the new Circular Economy ISO standards, any design decision needs to be made in reference to the broader system implications and in line with life cycle data to ensure that the full product — as part of a business system and connected to a broader social and industrial value chain — is considered, and all impacts are assessed and reduced to ensure high-level sustainability outcomes.
In ISO 15004 of the ISO CE standards, ecodesign is defined as taking a life cycle perspective to design and develop products that facilitate sustainable development, whereas Design for Circularity is the application of design to achieve the circular economy principles — these being the 6 presented in the new ISO standards, which I’ve detailed in this article.
Specifically, DfC is about rethinking design solutions so that repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing, longevity and reuse are integrated into the product design and service delivery models to extend the product’s life and maximize resource cycling to reduce material extraction. These actions reduce pressure on nature in order to facilitate ecosystem regeneration. Additionally, the social impacts of each life cycle stage (material extraction, production, transport, use and end of life) of both the product and the business system that delivers it all need to be considered in DfC.
Beyond the actual product/service, DfC is also about the business model that connects to the product design to ensure the intentional cycling of resources occurs through multiple systems. Optimizing the number of loops a product goes through and creating processes for easy value recovery (think design for disassembly, etc.) are all fundamental parts of DfC.
To ensure this does not compromise functionality, DfC includes design to maximize performance and increase the sharing of resources, as well as design that minimizes resource losses and ‘leakages’ like microplastics and solid waste escaping into nature.
Since DfC always ensures that a systems approach is taken and the entire life cycle impact of a product/service is understood and accounted for, this enables the product/service to be designed to mitigate adverse impacts whilst intentionally creating positive social and environmental effects all whilst meeting end user needs in highly functional and aesthetic ways. It actively extends the life of the product, increases longevity and maintains value over time, resulting in less demand for materials extracted from nature and more reuse of already created products to reduce the impact loads of production.
All these actions are done within a business model to ensure that the business as a whole is achieving financial success whilst reducing the overall negative environmental and social impacts. This is called decoupling, when economic growth occurs whilst the other social and environmental impacts are reduced.
There are many aspects that designers and producers need to consider, but it’s not difficult to adopt these skills as long as designers are given the time to apply them into the design process (check out all our courses for rapid upskilling here).
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation recently released a set of six leverage points for DfC; these include:
- Observe and interpret the system
- Envision Circular Futures
- Create the condition for collaboration
- Build circular design capacities
- Rewrite the rules
- Develop tools to design and evaluate
Whilst these help to frame the actions designers should take, they don’t provide clarity on what steps different design professions need to consider in order to activate circularity in the design process.
I’m presently working on a number of projects around the world driving forth circular design in professional design practice and education, so I wanted to share three of the primary principles that are crucial for designers and design-based businesses to adopt as part of their professional practice in order to be able to contribute to the circular economy in effective and commercially-viable ways. These are also connected to the new ISO standards and ensure that the foundational approaches that designers take are based on best practices.
Principle 1: Central Focus on Systems Thinking
The entire ISO Circular Economy series of standards is based on systems thinking. It’s the first of the 6 principles, and it’s the central activity you do throughout the 3 main standards (ISO 59004, 59010 & 59020). Systems thinking is about seeing the whole, identifying relationships and interconnection. It pushes past reductive ideas and ensures that the full spectrum of impacts and responsibilities are accounted for. From a DfC perspective, systems thinking ensures that the product is produced as part of a system that enables circularity to be embedded as a whole.
One of the concepts introduced in the ISO CE standards is the ‘system in focus’, which is where the product or organization is mapped to define what is critical to the system and what is external to the organization’s control. This is then used to identify inflows and outflows to the system to select indicators, define KPIs and focus the design intent on transforming a circular outcome.
To map a system in focus, central system elements of the product, business or set of connected activities are placed within a scope of reference that enables the discovery of interrelationships between the system in focus and the broader social, economic and environmental systems. Critically, in order to assess the circularity of your product or business, you must develop clarity on your system in focus in relation to the goal of your assessment.
The high-level response of Product-as-Service (PaS) models requires systems design and environmental impact assessment skills in order to see the full spectrum of present and potential impacts; this then requires knowing how to do systems mapping and understanding cause and effect, which is best documented via the systems tool of causal loop diagrams.
Even considering the behavioral and cultural issues and impacts (see Principle 3) that will be affected by and may result from circular design requires a systems thinking approach. For example, if you were to design a new product that uses a service model that requires customers to do a bit more work (like return a bottle, log in to a platform to order new inserts, or sign up for a service), then you need to map the touchpoints and design the full experience to ensure there are limited points of friction that would frustrate the customer while also maximizing the positive benefits that the customer gets from opting into this new service delivery model.
This is why I also believe that the expanded field of circular service design will be a big part of the circular economy (and the foundation for approach 3). We need to consider and design for the full spectrum of interactions across the system, from the materials flowing in from nature through the manufacturing system and onto the customer, how they interact with it and the ways it cycles around the economy before eventually reaching an end of life that is then absorbed back into the system. There are not just material flows and impacts on nature and social systems to account for, but also the actions that agents in the system take as a result of the design changes to the system in focus.
Systems thinking is a broad topic, and you can end up deep in the weeds if you try to get started with some of the more dense academic versions. My recommendations for reading are to start with my systems thinking article here, get Donella Meadows’ Thinking in Systems and then read the first few chapters of Peter Senge’s The Fifth Discipline.
I also recommend developing skills in these processes: systems cluster mapping, causal loop diagrams, supply chain mapping, systems interventions, general systems thinking, and behavior over time graphs. Check out my full article series on these here.
We have several classes on UnSchools Online and Circular Futures you can take to get you started on systems thinking.
Principle 2: Explore the Full Spectrum of Life Cycle Based Impacts
Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) is a practical tool based on the scientific process of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). There is an ISO that governs the development of LCA (ISO 14040), and it’s the best practice tool for understanding the impacts that activities in the economy have on nature.
The only issue is that LCAs are complex and do require a certain level of expertise to be fully validated. To achieve the requirements under the ISO standard for peer review, you would need to have significant training. However, there have been many new online streamlined LCA tools developed that are much easier to use, but they are not a full LCA and can only be used for internal assessment purposes. Full LCAs need to follow the ISO standard.
LCA is the backbone of the circular assessment process outlined in ISO 59020 and will be critical to the Ecodesign Directive in the EU, as life cycle data will be required to be developed and shared via Digital Product Passports (DPPs). We don’t yet know to what degree and if the use of streamlined tools will be acceptable, but the underlying concept of mapping a product’s impacts across its full life cycle is a critical skill that all designers now need, which is where life cycle thinking comes in. Based on the main life cycle stages a product goes through, LCT is the quick way of guesstimating and mapping the impacts across the life of a product.
I have written about life cycle thinking here and you can take my course Life Cycle Thinking & Assessment to get started, but the quick snapshot of LCT is that a product goes through 5 main life cycle stages: material extraction, manufacturing, packaging and transport, use and end of life. At each stage, there are inputs and outputs to the system, and there are consequential impacts on the environment and the economy. These are identified, broken down into processes and the impacts are mapped. In a full LCA, data is then assigned to this and quantifiable impacts are identified. Comparisons and consequential analysis can be done to determine alternatives and ways to mitigate impacts. LCAs don’t usually look at social impacts, but there is a growing body of work around developing social impact categories so that this can also be integrated into the assessment.
The best way to get started is to understand the concept and is to do a life cycle map on an existing product. Then, play around with any of the online life cycle tools now available like this and this. The UN also has free courses you can take here.
My recommended tools for Life Cycle Thinking & Analysis are life cycle mapping, streamlined LCAs, inflow and outflow process diagrams, impact assessment, supply chain mapping and material flow analysis. You can learn all about these via the UnSchool.
Principle 3: Design for Behavioral and Cultural Shifts
There’s no point in designing a technically circular product that fails when it enters the market or has built-in friction that the customer finds pain points in and thus abandons. So much of the circular economy is about redesigning products as services that must be more enjoyable and provide additional value to the customer if they are to be successful. This is an often forgotten critical part of a full systems design that enables CE solutions to be successful and desirable alternatives to their linear counterparts.
I’ve seen great circular design solutions fail due to poorly considered cultural and behavioral contexts. Every market is different; groups of people behave differently based on a variety of variables and social contexts that are often very specific to the community. Thus, design solutions may need to vary to enable a specific group to achieve effective interaction.
Here, the technique relies on a mixture of cultural, cognitive and contextual design. Behavior over time graphs, behavioral economics, observational research, and even empathy maps are useful tools to gain insights into customer needs and the best methods for engaging them in alternative behaviors and flows. Service and UI/UX are both fields of design that really step up to the plate here with the preexisting skills in understanding touchpoints, user interface design and the techniques that best guide or direct people to the outcomes that will benefit the customer experience.
We have a few courses on UnSchool that may be useful, such as Cognitive Science and Biases or Language Influence and Effect, but I do need to develop some more content on this emerging field!
Recommended tools for this approach include behavior over time graphs, empathy maps, product as service maps, service blueprints, cognitive science/behavioral economics and nudges.
– —
These 3 principles form the foundations for tools and techniques that designers and businesses can develop and expand based on their specific area of focus to enhance their capacity to design circularity into their products, processes and business models, as well as ensure that they are aligning with the new ISO standards for best practices in DfC.
As you can see there are many new complementary skills that designers need to adopt to be able to respond to the changing economic and cultural landscape. I see this as very exciting, and having taught many of these skills for decades, I can confirm they are not hard nor overly time-consuming to learn. The best thing to do is get the concepts and then apply, apply, apply. It’s through doing them in the real-world context that you will gain the skills needed to quickly move through them and adopt them as a viable part of your design practice.
Join my Circular Futures upcoming 4 part interactive workshop on the new ISO standards starting in Feb. Find out more here >
I train a lot of design teams in these, so reach out to me or my team if you want an in-house session to get you started.
Also, I just released my newest book, The UnSchool of Disruptive Design! This special edition compendium commemorates the 10 year anniversary of my experimental knowledge lab for adults, The UnSchool of Disruptive Design. The book combines all 5 of the original handbooks that I wrote to share the methods, approaches, and frameworks for making positive change that we’ve been sharing for the last decade. I wrote all new intros and outros, plus it includes updated and new graphics, activities, worksheets, alumni testimonials, quotes from change-makers we admire, and more! Grab your copy now via digital download or print on demand.