Ep 193: How designers can hardwire their skills for a circular economy | Circling Back

[01:00:00.000] - Emma Elobeid Somehow it's September. If, like me, you're a creative who, year after year, finds themselves inexplicably drawn to the sea of sparkling supermarket stationery, you might recognise what I call the pencil case problem. On the cusp of a fresh new quarter and beyond the linear lure of newness, that back to school feeling can also be an invitation to think about things differently.

[01:00:27.360] I'm Emma Elobeid, and in this fifth final episode of our Circling Back series of the Circular Economy Show, we're going back to the drawing board, literally. Because waste and pollution aren't accidents. They're the result of design, which means we can design them out. Design is where it all begins and where real change can happen.

[01:00:52.480] In this episode, Pippa sits down with Joe Iles, our Head of Design Activation at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, to talk about what circular design really means, how it differs from the traditional approach, where the creative crossovers are, and why designers hold the power to shape a better system.

[01:01:12.160] - Pippa Shawley Welcome, Joe. Thank you for joining us today. Could you start by telling us what circular design is? When I talk to my parents, for example, they talk about just having things made to last longer like the good old days. Is that all it is?

[01:01:30.000] - Joe Iles Well, yeah, good question, Pippa. This simple answer is maybe. It might be about making things to last. I sometimes think about some of the stuff that is around us in our world. I used to have a bit of an obsession with the stuff that people chuck out. There was a place I used to live, there was a lot of waste chucked out just on the street, slide-tipping.

[01:01:50.090] I was walking past a pile of rubbish one day and saw a pretty iconic Hoover that they sell a lot of in the UK, Henry the Hoover, this red round vacuum cleaner with a smiling face drawn on it. Pretty iconic. About two feet away in this pile of rubbish was actually the packaging that that vacuum cleaner, that that product came in. I noticed that on it, it said, "Henry the Hoover, Built to Last."

[01:02:21.240] I was just amazed that the packaging that it came in was being disposed of in the same moment as the product itself that was intended, like you to be made to last. I think, yes, partly circular design, yeah, it might be about making things durable. But actually, if we go a level deeper, circular design really is about reflecting like the circular economy does, reflecting the complexity, the beautiful complexity of the world around us.

[01:02:53.000] Circular economy takes its inspiration from nature, and there isn't a one-size-fits-all model in nature either. There isn't just one way of doing circular design. Really, I think the level up, to level up your knowledge of circular design, really, it's about thinking of, yes, the material and product selection. But also the business model, the service, the value that's being provided. Then at a higher level, the wider system. A really good everyday example of that might be something like the bicycle. It's a beautiful product. It's repairable, it's hopefully durable, and it's powered by renewable energy by us.

[01:03:37.820] It's a circular product, but if you go a level up, you could start thinking about bike rental, bike sharing, provision of spare parts. A really good working rental model where the bikes are in the right places where you need them. Or you can book them or know their availability of those rental bikes using a smartphone. Then, if you go and level up and look at the wider system, you could look at, is the city, it's a city in which we're living, welcoming a safer cyclist. Are there cycle lanes? Are there laws in place that encourage the use of cycling rather than other forms of transport? That would be the expert level way of thinking about circular design beyond just making something last.

[01:04:22.560] - Pippa Shawley I feel like you've probably answered this in that question, but we've been talking about circular design for a while now. You've been at the foundation for what? Ten years?

[01:04:31.300] - Joe Iles Yeah, a few more than that. But yeah, a long time.

[01:04:35.460] - Pippa Shawley Without putting you on the spot, why haven't we seen this thought process of circular design scale? Why isn't that the norm?

[01:04:45.220] - Joe Iles Yeah. Well, I think it is about, you're right, the scaling or becoming the norm, because there's no shortage of really good circular design ideas. I've been fortunate to be a judge on many design challenges, design competitions over the years, and you can go to startup conferences or student fairs and see a proliferation of ideas relating to circular design.

[01:05:09.920] But I think the tricky thing is that we're now at a stage where we're designing for a circular economy that we're trying to usher in. But ultimately, we're in a linear economy. We're in limbo right now. Despite our best efforts and the best efforts of aspiring and ambitious designers, there are so many incentives and forces that lock us into designing for the status quo.

[01:05:37.640] But the good news is there are a number of companies and other forces that are encouraging designers to design for a circular economy, to have more freedom to do that. If people listening to this are designers themselves, or they're in companies where they have that mandate, then that's great. But still applying it does take some really careful thought. I always say you have to do it. It's not just a checklist.

[01:06:09.820] There's loads of things I could go into about the application of circular design. But one thing I think maybe gets missed is that the circular design solution still has to work. Designers have historically been very good at this, but I think it's worth keeping in mind. They still need to balance as IDEO would put it, desirability, viability, and feasibility, these stalwart of good design thinking.

[01:06:40.960] People place different story in that as a recipe. But ultimately, circular design ideas, they do still need to work technically. They do still need to be financially viable, and they also need to be desirable. People still need to want to use them, enjoy using them. It might sound counterintuitive, but ultimately, the circular economy doesn't trump these things.

[01:07:07.120] Hopefully, it's an additional consideration for designers. But designers can't just design something that goes by the circular economy textbook and think that it's going to be a massive hit, it won't. It still needs to be something that people want to use and something that businesses want to invest in.

[01:07:23.520] - Pippa Shawley It's something I've thought about a lot recently is that circularity or sustainability shouldn't be the selling point of your product necessarily, because that's not going to be the huge scale change that we need.

[01:07:36.420] - Joe Iles It's a great point, and there's a couple of examples on this. I love this anecdote I heard a few years ago from Electrolux, who were doing a paper wash for washing machines. And maybe something you've covered on the podcast before that, you buy the service and not the product. The service provider maintains ownership of the product, so they can make it more durable and repair it and keep it in use for longer. A pretty circle economy business model of 101.

[01:08:13.660] But there was this phenomena that was described called sustainable marketing myopia, where the service provider oversold the environmental benefits and underplayed the fact that it was more convenient, they got a better product, it washed the clothes better and so on. Absolutely, I think the designers should be thinking along those lines, and also some marketing and sales people as well.

[01:08:38.960] But also, if we look at an example from a slightly different industry that is, it seems to be working really well, who I know have been on the podcast before, is Back Market, where I would pretty much always choose to buy refurbished electronics now. Because we know that there's an abundance of really good quality serviceable electronics in the market already, just looking for a home.

[01:09:02.540] But what a platform like Back Market and others seem to have done is to make the price accessible, to make it convenient and as easy and joyful to use as buying a brand-new product. Clearly, they've tapped into a way to make the economics work and to unlock the value of unused electronics. That's an example of a service with some careful design consideration, is now a working viable circular economy business model, but prioritises a whole range of benefits to the customer and to the business rather than just a circular economy altruism.

[01:09:44.560] - Pippa Shawley Yeah. You've spoken there about the difference between mobile phones and bicycles and washing machines. They obviously can't have exactly the same categories of what makes them potentially adhere to circular design rules. But are there some things that if a designer is listening and thinking about how they can bring circular design into their work that they can go through?

[01:10:09.000] - Joe Iles Yeah. There's loads of guidance out there. There is good guidance on design for disassembly, on material selection, on things like durability, best practise on innovative business models, and so on. That's really good and designers that are listening should embrace those and apply them, but also have a dose of reality. Don't be surprised if the impact of your very durable product or your very smart edgy material doesn't match up to your expectation because the wider system isn't in place to really maximise that potential.

[01:10:49.120] Get started where you can, it would be a piece of advice. But also look at some of the other requirements that are out there. Some businesses have taken it upon themselves to create their own product checklists and design guidelines. I know IKEA have done this for a number of years. Fashion companies like Bestseller, H&M, Nike, probably many, many more have created their own guidelines to say, "When we create product, this is how we want to do it."

[01:11:15.460] There's also great industry-level guidance that is still often voluntary but is becoming quite impactful, such as the jeans redesign guidelines that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation produced, the Circular Buildings Toolkit, which we made with Arup and things like the Circular Electronics Partnership, who created a circular design guidance for consumer electronics.

[01:11:40.260] Then a level up from that, like with the bike sharing example, there are great policy measures that are coming in. Right to Repair is a really good one that's mandating things like provision of spare parts over 8–10 years, depending on different policies around Europe. Signalling to customers that if you buy a particular product, it will be more repairable than another, which is something we're seeing in France. Whilst there isn't some universal checklist, what we are seeing is per industry, per company, and then from policy level, there is a much greater degree of guidance out there in 2025 than we've seen in the past.

[01:12:24.560] - Pippa Shawley Does any of that mean that designers need to learn new things, or does this all draw on the essentials of design in general?

[01:12:34.560] - Joe Iles I think designers will need to have a good understanding of the circular economy. I would encourage people to do that. I think, obviously, because of all those years of working on it that you mentioned, it is a fun and engaging thing to learn about and can give a sense to designers that their work can have an impact. Designers have been in the past few decades, maybe seen as the people or very complicit in creating the problem of waste and pollution by fabricating desire for things that we don't really need or use for very long.

[01:13:12.740] I think reconnecting designers with a sense of the possibility of their impact. Circular economy is great for that. But the good news, on the other hand, is that there are a bunch of skills that designers already have, and design teams already have that can be called into service of the transition to a circular economy that companies may not even be maximising at the moment.

[01:13:33.680] We looked at some in a short study called adaptive strategy from ambition to action and adaptive strategy for circular design. The six areas that we thought were really impactful where designers can play a role were understanding the system. Designers are great at understanding how systems work. They do this every day through things like service design. The dynamics between different products or actors and the exchanges that happen within those systems, designers are really good at that.

[01:14:00.000] Understanding and showcasing what a circular future might look like. That can be in a very radical way through things like speculative design, asking people to imagine what their product or their company might look like in a circular future. But also through things like prototyping. This is a great circular idea for a circular product or service. How would it actually work in practise? How do we get all the kinks and niggles that would make it not work if we went to market?

[01:14:25.460] Building capacity, so learning and training, inspiring colleagues to get hands-on with circular design. It's another area which we've heard from a number of companies in our network. Creating space for collaboration. Designers are very well known for this. Facilitation, designing workshops or exercises that bring different stakeholders forward together to co-create solutions is a sweet spot for the design team. Rules, which you've just spoken about. Responding to rules or helping to set a set of rules or criteria for product creation.

[01:14:59.500] Then finally, tools. Designers use tools for creating and inventing things every day. They should be asking, are they fit for designing for a circular economy, the types of metrics or information I'm accessing through those tools? Is it suitable for designing for a circular economy? Or do I need to look at a different range of tools, maybe tools to evaluate impact or predict impact or tools for material selection? There may be a different set that designers need to be using to create a different set of outcomes that align with a circular economy.

[01:15:33.840] That's adaptive strategy for circular design, the piece we created. We think that that creates a lot of different opportunities beyond just the product itself for designers and design teams to support the transition to a circular economy.

[01:15:48.480] - Pippa Shawley You mentioned that adaptive strategy there. If people want to find out more about circular design, what should they do? What should we be sticking in the show notes today?

[01:15:57.320] - Joe Iles We should be sticking in. Yeah, that's that study itself. I still think the Circular Design Guide that the Ellen MacArthur Foundation created with IDEO a few years ago is a great starting point. It's a set of 24 free methods that designers can pick up to start applying to their own workflow. Then there's an abundance of great reports and guidance out there.

[01:16:23.680] When I want to be inspired about circular design, I just look at the circular design practises and output, the guidance that some of those major companies like IKEA or H&M are writing and publishing. Because that's where you see how corporates, how large businesses are taking that theory of the circular economy and design for a circular economy and applying it to their own products.

[01:16:48.500] - Pippa Shawley Yeah, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for giving us this whistle-stop tour through the circular design world today, Joe.

[01:16:55.540] - Joe Iles Thanks, Pippa.

[01:16:56.660] - Emma Elobeid While our current linear economy is hardwired for linear familiarity, which can sometimes lead to designers feeling frustrated or locked into the status quo, the pace of change is picking up. Circular design is so much more than a checklist. Those who are able to arm themselves with the tools, both mental and practical, to support an ever more tangible, ever more desirable circular future, have a hugely exciting part to play in what comes next.

[01:17:26.000] That's it from me and my pencil case obsession. Thanks for joining me on this journey through the Circular Economy Show Archives. I hope you've enjoyed revisiting them as much as I have. Pippa and the rest of the team will be back soon with new episodes, so hit subscribe, and you'll be the first to know when they land. We'll see you next time.