Circular Design: Ready to speed up at DRIVE 2017

Circular Design: Ready to speed up! This was the central theme for a day full of insights, inspiration and networking during CIRCO’s programme hosted by CLICKNL’s Design Research & Innovation Festival DRIVE 2017, at the Natlab in Eindhoven. An impression.

Implementing circular value propositions
Nowadays, many companies are implementing circular value propositions based on the circular design approach: up till now over 200 companies have started to create business through circular design with the CIRCO project. This has led to a large amount of very diverse experiences and challenges, of which CIRCO’s Pieter van Os presented a glimpse: from the design challenge ‘to create optimal future flexibility at minimal complexity and cost’, to an industry (and design?) challenge: ‘create new financing models and accounting principles’. One of these circular entrepreneurs that joined CIRCO, Jurn Jan van den Bremer from Clear Vision Cooling, told us his story. His presentation taught us that a circular solution can be offered as part of different strategies and value propositions. He talked about new doors for food cabinets in supermarkets made from recycled PET, that save energy by closing open cooling cabinets and improve lighting and visibility. But the key to sell the product is to frame it right, depending on who you are dealing with.. Instead of selling doors, it might be about selling the right shopping experience.

Recommendations
During the breakout sessions, many methodologies, challenges for circular development and visions on the role of the creative professional were shared. A small selection:

• When you create value propositions for products, think beyond the moment of the first transaction.
• In developing circular business, material based design can be essential; design provides a temporary storage of materials.
• When working together in a circular chain the entire group should work together, literally, on-site.
• When developing new materials and applications, designers can create new chains to push innovation. They should also see the opportunities to work together in existing chains by creating practical solutions and examples and thereby factor in upscaling.
• From ‘new’ products, a great deal more is expected: the consumer needs to be given a prominent position when new products and services are being developed, and creative professionals can contribute to creating added value.
• A challenge for creative professionals is to incorporate uncertainties within your design process, an architect might not know what materials and products there will be at hand when it comes to realization, a product designer will deal with multiple cycles of use.

Different ways forward
In the end, there are many roles for creative professionals when it comes to speeding up the development towards a circular economy. This edition of DRIVE has helped to get a grip on the different strengths. According to host of the day Erik Roscam Abbing it all comes down to developing your own skills and understanding your role, understanding others roles, making connections and sharing the story with the people you work with. The creative professional and the circular design approach help to create system changes and manage the complexity of this task. An insight that helped to shape that complexity was presented by Conny Bakker. She told us there are two main strategies being used in circular development at the moment: the ‘open loop, open source’ and the ‘closed loop, closed source’ concept. These concepts vary widely in the extent of product transparency they propose, the responsibility for creating cyclical product and material flows, and the view of what constitutes a ‘good’ or a ‘bad’ circular product. These issues are relevant regarding the realization of a circular economy and the provision of guidelines for circular product design. Let’s explore the different ways forward!

Want to read more about CIRCO, and/or to see the slides from the CIRCO sessions? Check the website!