34
O. Rexfelt and A. Selvefors
Rexfelt 2017) offers worksheets and/or online platforms that can aid designers to
explore different types of design opportunities.
A common denominator amongst these and other proposed tools is that they
primarily focus on design opportunities related to production processes and/or business models. While such opportunities are essential to address to bring about a
transition to a circular economy, opportunities to support changes in consumption
are equally important (van Dam et al. 2017; Kirchherr et al. 2017). A transition
to a circular economy is dependent on that people shift from linear consumption
processes (i.e. buying new products, using, and disposing of them as trash) to circular
consumption processes (i.e. obtaining pre-used products, using, and passing them
on to others). Circular consumption (such as renting, borrowing or buying second
hand) often requires new activities and entails different practicalities compared to
linear consumption, which may sometimes make people refrain from obtaining preused products or passing them on (de los Rios and Charnley 2016). Hence, if aiming
to support changes in consumption through design it is crucial to gain an in depth
understanding of people’s consumption processes and what they entail for everyday
life.
Although available circular design tools either implicitly or explicitly take
(some) aspects related to consumption into consideration, such as circularity-related
behaviours and factors influencing acceptance of circular offers (Selvefors et al.
2019), they do not sufficiently address the changes in activities and practicalities that
circular consumption often entails. Instead of highlighting the crucial role people
play for product circularity, available tools often merely consider people as recipients of circular offers that should adopt circular behaviours. As a consequence,
important design opportunities to support circular consumption, such as designing
products that make it easy for people to inspect, value, or disassemble a product, are
often overlooked (de los Rios and Charnley 2016).
The aim of this paper is to introduce a new circular design toolkit that have
been developed to especially address people’s consumption processes and the design
challenges they entail. Following a brief method overview, the toolkit and included
tools will be presented and the contribution as well as implications for design practice
and future work will be discussed.
3.2 Method
The toolkit proposed in this paper is the result of an explorative and iterative process
that began in 2013. The process was initiated with an explorative workshop in which
seven researchers in the fields of user-centred design and sustainable design explored
how product circularity could be framed with the user taking centre stage. Already
existing and common representations of product circularity were examined in order
to obtain an understanding of how users were represented in these, and to confirm
the need for a new representation. A new user-centred perspective on product circularity, the Use2Use-perspective, was then developed during the following years. For
O. Rexfelt and A. Selvefors
Rexfelt 2017) offers worksheets and/or online platforms that can aid designers to
explore different types of design opportunities.
A common denominator amongst these and other proposed tools is that they
primarily focus on design opportunities related to production processes and/or business models. While such opportunities are essential to address to bring about a
transition to a circular economy, opportunities to support changes in consumption
are equally important (van Dam et al. 2017; Kirchherr et al. 2017). A transition
to a circular economy is dependent on that people shift from linear consumption
processes (i.e. buying new products, using, and disposing of them as trash) to circular
consumption processes (i.e. obtaining pre-used products, using, and passing them
on to others). Circular consumption (such as renting, borrowing or buying second
hand) often requires new activities and entails different practicalities compared to
linear consumption, which may sometimes make people refrain from obtaining preused products or passing them on (de los Rios and Charnley 2016). Hence, if aiming
to support changes in consumption through design it is crucial to gain an in depth
understanding of people’s consumption processes and what they entail for everyday
life.
Although available circular design tools either implicitly or explicitly take
(some) aspects related to consumption into consideration, such as circularity-related
behaviours and factors influencing acceptance of circular offers (Selvefors et al.
2019), they do not sufficiently address the changes in activities and practicalities that
circular consumption often entails. Instead of highlighting the crucial role people
play for product circularity, available tools often merely consider people as recipients of circular offers that should adopt circular behaviours. As a consequence,
important design opportunities to support circular consumption, such as designing
products that make it easy for people to inspect, value, or disassemble a product, are
often overlooked (de los Rios and Charnley 2016).
The aim of this paper is to introduce a new circular design toolkit that have
been developed to especially address people’s consumption processes and the design
challenges they entail. Following a brief method overview, the toolkit and included
tools will be presented and the contribution as well as implications for design practice
and future work will be discussed.
3.2 Method
The toolkit proposed in this paper is the result of an explorative and iterative process
that began in 2013. The process was initiated with an explorative workshop in which
seven researchers in the fields of user-centred design and sustainable design explored
how product circularity could be framed with the user taking centre stage. Already
existing and common representations of product circularity were examined in order
to obtain an understanding of how users were represented in these, and to confirm
the need for a new representation. A new user-centred perspective on product circularity, the Use2Use-perspective, was then developed during the following years. For