According to architect and sustainability/circularity thought leader, William McDonough, "design is a signal of intention." He further argues that "waste" and "pollution" are a consequence of bad design. Nearly 30% of all carbon released into the air come from our "stuff"; our clothing, chairs, bags, products and goods.

Important choices are made in the design stage. Circular design is about changing the choices we make at the beginning of the design process. Designs also includes how people interact with goods and services and systems along their journey, such as with logistics, collection, and infrastructure systems. In the case of physical products, how different materials are combined and how easily they can be reused, repaired, refurbished, or disassembled is also decided at the design stage.

These crucial choices radiate across the entire design system, affecting sourcing, production, and how we use things. Importantly, they also determine ‘what happens next’ and what is possible after something has been used. Does it become waste? Or can it be part of a circular economy, where waste is designed out and materials are destined for one valuable application after another?

It’s hard to reverse the impacts of design decisions once they are implemented. Design decisions often lead to long-term investments that lock us into a certain model for years to come. As Radjou and Prabhu in their book Frugal Innovation argue, “over 70% of a product’s life-cycle costs and environmental footprint is determined during its design phase.”

Today, most of the materials we lose, and often after just one short use. In industries such as fashion and plastic packaging more than 80% of all materials in our products and services are destined for landfill or incinerators, with a significant amount also leaking out of the system and into natural environments. They are part of a "take-make-waste model". We take finite resources, use them only for a short period of time, after which they are lost from the economy. This is an enormous loss. We miss out on the opportunity to keep products and materials in circulation, and with it all the creativity, labour, and energy that went into them.

That’s why we need to adopt a fundamentally different approach in the way we create the products, services, and systems around us. We need to look ‘upstream’ to tackle the challenges we are facing — tackling them at the design stage rather than treating the symptoms of problems. We need to look at systems as a whole to understand how our creations fit into the bigger picture. And we need to have an inspiring vision and framework that can work in the long run.

Circular Design and the circular economy offer such a framework, built on the principles of eliminating waste and pollution from the outset, keeping products and materials in use at their highest value, and regenerating natural systems. Just like in nature, by design everything is food for something else — materials flow from one (life)form into the next. It is a model that can work for aeons. Just like it has in nature for 3.8 billion years.

By decoupling economic activity from linear material flows, it is a model that goes beyond “doing less bad” (McDonough) to being one of regeneration. Therefore, the more we create within the circular economy model, the better the results — for customers, businesses, society and the environment. It’s about designing better solutions for people and meeting needs within a regenerative system.

Why now?

At the same time, we have powerful technological tools at hand that we may utilize to design powerfully and responsibly for a regenerative future. Over the last years, we have gained unprecedented technological abilities: From new bio-benign materials, to data-powered abilities to understand and design across complex supply chains, to digitally-enabled business models that address our needs without extractive material flows. We have possibilities to design and work with nature, rather than against it. In conjunction with the rising desire among creatives to use the transformative power of design as a force for good, we have a real opportunity for change.

Getting started

Strategies to design for a circular economy come in so many shapes, but ultimately what matters most is how we bring new mindsets and practices to the table in our individual contexts, and how we collectively evolve our design practices in the coming years. It’s an exciting journey, and we are only at the beginning of it.

To get started, we can challenge ourselves to answer important questions in the design process:

• How might we design in a way that addresses ‘user needs’ AND that can work in the long term?
• How might we create products and services that fit into our (eco)-systems, and become ‘food’ rather than waste and pollution?
• How might we use design as a force for positive change and address the big challenges of this century, such as climate change and the loss in biodiversity?

2. Cradle to Cradle Design is Circularity in Practice

Below is an excerpt from WIlliam McDonough's website:

In their 2002 book Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, architect William McDonough and green chemist Michael Braungart presented an integration of design and science that provides enduring benefits for society from safe materials, water and energy in circular economies and eliminates the concept of waste.