The inevitable transition from a take-make-waste society to a circular economy presents exciting and rewarding challenges for designers, writes Sarah Housley.
It’s getting harder for designers to sleep at night. As global warming starts to continuously exceed 1.5 degrees celsius, the industries that promote and enable consumerism – including advertising and marketing, but also design – face a clear choice: to radically reorient, or continue to be complicit in the triple planetary crisis.
Design as we know it is doomed, but that’s a good thing for designers. The job of making things has to change. Designers, as the problem-solvers (and question-askers) we are known to be, have a brilliant chance to design the changed systems we urgently need.
Designing beyond the new can be empowering, exciting, and ultimately extremely rewarding
Increasingly, design will start not with the new, but with redesign and reuse, and its goal will be enabling and rewarding positive behavioural change, as opposed to selling a new product. This might feel scary, because it marks a major shift from how many designers were taught their craft and how they have worked previously.
The blank canvas is famously the starting point for creativity, and raw materials still tend to be the starting point for prototyping and design development, rather than used or salvaged materials. Circular systems are challenging to work with; reprocessed materials can be inconsistent in quality, supply and behaviour.
But designing beyond the new can be empowering, exciting, and ultimately extremely rewarding. It instantly addresses “eco-anxiety” and the nagging guilt that some designers are starting to feel.
A designer I know recently told me that towards the end of her former career in fast fashion, she was painfully aware that she “was just creating landfill”. These same concerns increasingly apply to tech and interiors too, where low-quality items are produced with the expectation that they will be discarded within a few years.
If we want to ensure that design itself will continue to be valued in the decades ahead, we need to develop skills of transition and transformation, of strategic reduction and design for repair and longevity. As a recent Design Council report pointed out, there’s plenty of room to do so.
Design schools will need to teach mindsets that decentre the new, and design media should be challenging itself to cover smart adaptations and well-designed systems with the same enthusiasm that it applies to covering a product launch. In this changed ecosystem, there are five broad and important areas in which designers will increasingly be able to specialise and innovate.
Can the process of caring for an item be designed to be as pleasurable as using it?
The first is smart subtraction. One of designers’ key roles in this decade and beyond will be in taking things away, designing products to use fewer materials and coatings and be less intensive in their manufacturing. This subtraction extends to colour choices: a recent study found that red, green and blue plastics become brittle and fragment into microplastics more quickly than black, white and silver-coloured plastics, leading campaigners to urge manufacturers to move away from brighter colours.
The second key area is maintenance, which will come to be as important as innovation. As people use items for longer, designers will start to extend the lifetime they plan for a product to be used for, and factor longer periods of use into design choices.
This could mean product mock-ups that show the product not only at point-of-sale but 10 or 20 years into use, when its surfaces have begun to patinate beautifully. Designing for maintenance also impacts user experience: can the process of caring for an item be designed to be as pleasurable as using it?
Alongside subtraction and maintenance, the art of adaptation – sensitively adding to and evolving existing products, services and structures – will be a core design skill. Adaptive reuse requires first familiarising yourself with the history of an object, space or experience, so that you can thoughtfully respond to its context and culture of use as you evolve it into something else. This could mean designers taking on some of the mindset of a historian, archaeologist or archivist, and extending the ethnography, observation and co-design work they already do.
Designers will have a crucial role to play in making reuse, rental and refurbishment mainstream. These are all growing areas, and increasingly businesses will be using these processes instead of designing and selling new products. All of these processes need to be designed, both in terms of the “reverse supply chain” – the process of getting used products back from customers to be refurbished and sold again – and in terms of the end user experience.
We are living through the decisive decade, and designers have urgent decisions to make
The touchpoints of repair and resale will need to be as well-designed as the process of buying something new in order to compete effectively with the convenience and dopamine rush of shopping. Sojo does this beautifully for fashion, while Nimble connects people with household goods that need fixing to nearby “repair artists”.
Finally, the art of designing for end-of-life processes is being explored by a handful of innovative thinkers, including And End, a design consultancy that “designs endings” for products. There is a huge amount of potential for designers to specialise at this point of the product cycle, reimagining the process of dismantling products and recycling components.
Let’s see designers-in-residence at recycling facilities, working out which materials have reuse potential and setting up symbiotic partnerships between industries. Or design team inspiration days that swap out a museum trip with a visit to a recycling centre or landfill site to watch and to witness, to set the context for their choices.
We are living through the decisive decade, and designers have urgent decisions to make. Our considerable skillsets can be transferred from enabling a take-make-waste culture to accelerating a reduce-redesign-reuse culture.
That shift will generate a host of new creative challenges and possibilities. Design teams will face the task of retooling to work beyond the new, and of influencing the businesses they work within to adapt at the same speed. But once they do, they will have immediate impact – and designers might be able to sleep better at night again.
Sarah Housley is a writer, researcher, consultant and speaker specialising in the future of design and ethical innovation. She is former head of consumer tech at trend forecaster WGSN.
The photo shows a shelving unit made from aluminium smelting offcuts, designed by Studio ThusThat.
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