Circular Design

Circlular Design

Whether you’re a designer or any other type of member of society, we can all agree that we’d feel better using products that are not harmful to the planet, and better yet if it was beneficial to it. Circular Design proposes the idea that what we make can actually restore life after it is used, which is an ingenious concept given that so much of what we make and use today does not. Rather, most of the items we purchase leak toxic chemicals into the water, ground, and air, and end up as a piece of waste for hundreds to thousands of years. This unethical mind-set has become embedded in our manufacturing process and in how we consume and dispose of products. It would take a lot of effort to change the way things are in order to think 14 KERN more sustainably, but we are stepping into a new generation of designers that are paving the way for future designers to build upon.

We’re always hearing about what the next big trend in design will be. When it comes to Circular Design, it isn’t just a trend that will come and go. Circular design and sustainable design are about longevity, and it’s becoming the new mind-set that designers are leading their work with.

When thinking about products in a straight line you get a pattern that looks like this: you buy something, you use something, and you throw the thing out. Yet, in nature, when something is done serving its purpose, it decomposes or rots, becoming a source of new energy for life. Nature is cyclical and interconnected. If we can integrate our industrialized society with the natural cycle of life, we'd end up creating products that break the mold of 'use me today and throw me away tomorrow.' It connects us to a bigger reality when we find soloutions for what to do next when a product reaches its end of lifeWW.

There’s a diagram called the Butterfly Diagram. It has two main focuses, a biological cycle and a technical cycle. It's a feedback-rich system which makes it circular. The technical side thinks of ways to be restorative, using recycling as the loop of last resort. It’s the more inner feedback loops within the Butterfly Diagram that provides better options for the product before getting to the recycling stage. This includes remanufacturing, reusing, and maintenance. On the biological side of the diagram, it includes the materials used, and thinks of ways of creating flows of energy, materials and information that can return positively and safely into the system, rebuilding and restoring its environment naturally. By thinking resourcefully, we can find ways of using biological materials to do things like generate energy, become fertilizers, be used for the extraction of chemicals, and cascades. Cascades is an under explored area that takes a high quality piece of material and finds many different ways to reuse it. A suit made of cotton, for instance, is made of a material that can be reused for insulation, cleaning products, wipes, or stuffing in a car seat before positively and safely returning it into the natural system.

It’s important to remember, the economy is designed by us to work in a ceratin way. When designers see the systemic context of this man made economy, we realize that it can be redesigned and improved, playing an important role in innovating the circular economy. Design activists and networks of organizations create spaces for this free thinking to take place, resulting in a diversity of thinking that combines inclusive and collaborative values that enhance the input and working conditions to strengthen the design thinking process.

The power of design is being able to shape the future that we want, and it all starts with a space to see and think differently. By stepping back and zooming in closer from different levels of complexity can help us think about the system that the object or experience is part of in order to see how they might influence the system through the idea of circularity. As humans have done throughout the history, learning from nature is one of the best ways to generate new ideas for circular design. Just as nature evolves and finds ways to improve, products and innovations that come from circular design will too.