Our Right to Repair

by Leyla Acaroglu, originally published on Medium

It should not come as a surprise to anyone that our current linear economy relies on continuous sales, which requires things to wear out faster, look a bit uglier and quickly become less desirable than the latest version, all in order to keep feeding the linear ‘waste-based’ economy. That’s why consumer products are often made to break, designed with an intentional lack of replacement parts, or have their lifespans controlled by the producer through savvy tech interventions.

The term used to define the practice of intentionally designing products to break or become aesthetically undesirable is called planned obsolescence. This is a well-used technique that companies rely on to increase sales through manipulating consumer desires and product functionality. It manifests itself in all types of products, from high-end tech to appliances, to fashion and even furniture.

When a product is designed this way, it’s hiding all sorts of tactics that are intended to lock owners out of the products they have purchased by making it nearly impossible to repair or upgrade once they break.

There are a few ways that this occurs. One is to restrict the availability of spare parts and add clauses to user agreements that state that warranties are voided or even that it’s illegal to use third-party repairs or products. Another way is to throttle usability, such as reducing the operating speed of a tech product or designing a battery to wear down after a certain number of recharges (not to mention making it impossible to get into the battery to replace it when this happens!). Products can also be easily made to appear old or outdated by manufacturers as they introduce newer versions of their best sellers. This is called aesthetic obsolescence, and it has its roots in the car industry.

To maintain the benefits of a closed system, producers work to ensure that they have legal and technical rights over their goods through iron-clad user agreements (who really reads them anyway!?) and even upgrades that limit their use (such as printers that don’t work when you use non-authorized ink cartridges — this NPR podcast tells a great story about this). Home printer companies are notorious for this kind of practice, with them losing several legal cases where consumers fought back against their tactics.

As more and more products become part of the internet of things, I wonder if all our tech-enabled consumer products will move toward limited functionality by design as well? After all, it’s a money-generating (and thus addictive) business model. What irks me the most about these insidious practices is that we citizens have limited rights to repair, and in many cases, there are great inequalities as people get trapped in continual consumption cycles that are bad for their bank balances and for the planet as a whole.

There are a host of consumer rights eradicated by these practices. What’s more infuriating than being fleeced of money for products we already own is that the material losses are far greater than just our bank balances. We eat into future resources every single time tech is wasted, not repaired or prematurely turned obsolete. Phones and laptops contain many different complex materials, including rare Earth minerals, all of which (as the name implies) are in limited supply on Earth — not to mention, there are stark concerns around the ethics of the mining of these minerals along with the energy expenditure required to dig them up in the first place!

When companies lock us citizens out of the products they produce, they are manipulating the market so that we are forced to continue to buy replacement products over and over again despite our frustration. This means people who may already be vulnerable to market changes are further disadvantaged, as re-purchasing brand new products is expensive.

But right now, so is repair!

Last week, I managed to spill my morning coffee on my cell phone as I accidentally kicked the phone off a table (don’t even ask). The result was a messy floor and a broken screen with a dash of coffee in it. I looked up a local repair shop and within an hour and a half the nice man had replaced my screen — all I had to do was part with 160 pounds. Given the cost of a replacement phone is 4 or 5 times higher than that (and I’m obsessed with sustainability), once I got over the sting, I felt the price was a fair exchange for his skills in fixing my mistake. The only issue is that since the phone company doesn’t want me or him to repair their products, they don’t issue any parts to independent repair shops. In fact, what we just did is actively policed by phone companies like Apple. The new screen is not an official replacement product (as these are not available to people outside the phone company), so it also makes my battery drain faster. All of these tactics are designed to disincentivize me from getting my phone repaired under the conditions that suit me (fast and local) and instead, attempt to keep me within a tightly-controlled ecosystem.

I used to have a Fairphone 2, which is a phone designed to allow repair by the user. When I broke that screen (again, don’t even ask, I am a very clumsy person!), I ordered the replacement part online for under $100, it was shipped to me and I replaced the screen myself. I was a bit annoyed that they didn’t offer a take-back service for the now-defunct broken screen part (which was an entire section of the phone), so when that phone finally stopped working (and they had stopped providing upgrades to that product line), I had to get a mainstream phone (albeit reconditioned and second hand).

Repair should be mainstream and accessible. It should not be the exclusive offerings of a small start-up phone company, but a right that we can all engage with when we need to, without breaking any laws or ending up with a battery draining issue! To do this, companies need to offer repair manuals and spare parts, as well as be open to repair being part of their product's life journey.

A big part of moving to a circular economy is repair. It’s a far better solution than recycling when it comes to high-value products, as it keeps functionality and materials in play. Repair is also more preferable to remanufacturing, as again, it avoids additional impacts. There is a hierarchy of post-disposable design solutions that can massively reduce waste and move us to a more sustainable future.

Whilst we wait for companies to take the initiative, we need citizen’s rights to repair through consumer legislation. Thankfully, this is happening right now all over the world. France has even gone as far as making planned obsolescence illegal.

The Right to Repair Movement

Fortunately for us, there have been many people fighting for our rights to repair for decades, and they are getting some big wins right now.

The movement has gained a lot of momentum recently, with the EU and UK putting in place new legislation, and last week Joe Biden signing an Executive Order to enable the right to repair across the U.S. This will enable farmers the right to repair their tractors (currently they are locked out by the technology), and it will direct the Federal Trade Commission to create new rules to prevent manufacturers from imposing repair restrictions (such as to your cell phone!).

Biden’s Executive Order will “make it easier and cheaper to repair items you own by limiting manufacturers from barring self-repairs or third-party repairs of their products.” — The Whitehouse Fact Sheet: Executive Order on Promoting Competition in the American Economy, July, 9, 2021.

A report from PC Mag showed that most Americans support a right to repair, no matter what political side of the aisle they’re on. The more people become aware that they don’t currently have a right to repair, the more the demand grows for legal remedies to this legal loophole that has been exploited at our expense for decades.

Whilst there are many things to celebrate with these new laws, there is still much room for improvement when it comes to eliminating waste by design and giving consumers true rights over the things they own (such as smartphones not being included in the new UK legislation).

The Road to Now

The use of planned obsolescence has been known for decades, and the impacts of waste on the planet too, especially electronic waste. But recently, several high-profile lawsuits (such as both Apple and Samsung having to pay out a few million dollars to settle class-action lawsuits against them intentionally throttling batteries so customers would be forced to upgrade), has made more and more people aware of the practices, which in turn, encourages a stronger legislative demand for consumer protections.

Recently, we have even had the co-founder of Apple Steve Wozniak come out in support of the right to repair. He said there would have been no Apple computer had he not had access to the schematics of tech in the 80s, which enabled him to tinker and create. Apple is not alone; they are like many in the tech sector who avoid releasing any user diagrams or schematics that would make it possible for people to upgrade, repair or adapt the products that they purchased, and should thus technically own.

This method of locking us all out of our consumer goods by limiting our ability to repair or upgrade products that we own has made its way into everything from our tech to our washing machines.

Right to repair is all about extending the useful life of products, making spare parts available for home repairs, legalizing and incentivizing repair and tackling the insidious practice of making things to break (planned obsolescence). These changes will re-enable tinkering and user adaptation; they’ll also save us money and ensure that we have our consumer rights protected.

Companies like iFixit have been working to make repair a normalized part of the design and the consumer community for years. They buy up new products as they are released, and their engineers get to work taking them apart to create the repair manuals and videos that the companies should have created to begin with (and hate them making!). They also sell the toolkits that my phone repair shop probably used to fix my coffee-laden cellular device!

ifixit reporting on right to repair wins for 2020

There are also repair cafes, the repair association, Maker Labs, and a healthy fixer community that has been pushing for these rights for years. So, thank you to everyone who has been campaigning for our rights to be protected and for the better design of products!

Many years ago, in 2011, I ran a week-long collaborative experience around waste and repair called the Repair Workshops (inspired in part by Platform 21’s Repair Manifesto). 10 talented artists and repairers first spent days repairing mounds of broken household stuff that we had been given by a local charity shop that was about to whisk it all off to a landfill (charities are often burdened with huge waste fees from people’s broken donations). Then we spent a few days open to the public, offering free repairs to anyone. It was so moving and amazing to see people of all ages come in with some personal or favorite product that they wanted to have fixed. One lady even brought in some bread with her to test the toaster she had been given on her wedding day 50 years before.

2011 Repair Workshops

Through this project, I discovered that no matter what it is, people often want to keep the things they already own. Repair is a hugely rewarding experience, as something that has lost its functionality is brought back to life again. People not only have an emotional attachment to things that have spent time in their lives, but the value of already having it makes it inherently more valuable.

The lack of replacement parts, skilled repair people and a fixing culture forces us to replace rather than repair, which increases our personal costs and eats into future generations’ ability to have access to natural resources that we are wasting today. Everything new that we make requires huge amounts of natural resources, creates carbon emissions and contributes to all sorts of environmental and social ills.

Repair is not just a fun and money-saving thing to do — it’s a vital part of the transition to the circular economy. Repair is about extending the life of a product, but it’s also about valuing materials that come from nature as well. By designing for repair, it shows that a company also values its customers and their choices. It shows that they have invested in higher-value, longer-lasting products that we should then also invest in.

Whilst the new right to repair bills are welcomed, until companies take proactive action to ensure that the design of their products is sustainable and circular, we will continue to be stuck with things that are made to break, along with limited options for spare parts, along with the tools and skilled people to repair them. We will bear the cost of bad design, and legislators will continue to have to try to fill the gaps of rights that tactics like planned obsolescence take away from us.

Repair is a right that we should all have the option to use when and how we need it.

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To find out more about designing for the circular economy, check out my handbook Circular Systems Design and my classes on sustainable design and the circular economy.

New Free Toolkit! 3D Sustainability in Business Framework Starter Kit

Exciting news: we have an amazing new FREE, action-oriented toolkit to share with you to help any organization transform their business practices to be more sustainable and circular.

As part of our Sustainability in Business course series, this new 50-page Starter Kit includes an overview of our 3D framework for assessing, actioning and transforming the operational, product and experiential impacts of any business. Filled with useful content, clear graphics, and several sample worksheets, you can learn the framework and get started on your sustainability journey right away!

The 18 impact arenas explored in the 3D framework for business sustainability

Businesses need to recognize that they play a critical role in the global transformation toward a more sustainable future. The way that they operate the products that they produce and the experiences that they create for their workers and customers all interact with the natural world through supply chains and design choices. Our framework helps dissect these to understand impact areas and then provides the steps for taking action. 

In the context of business, sustainability is about ensuring that workplaces, products, business structures and customer experiences are ethical, equitable and economically viable.  However, we understand that sustainability is complex and often misunderstood, and it can feel like an overwhelming pursuit for business managers. So, in alignment with our equity mission to continuously release at least 20% of our content and knowledge for free, we are very excited to share our new toolkit that offers up a simple framework for assessment to action.

Download the 3D Sustainability in Business Framework Free Starter Kit

Behind this toolkit are thousands of hours of workshops, trainings, projects and professional expertise focused on the key impact areas of sustainability in business. You can expect to discover how to understand impacts, assess impacts, and take action right away after utilizing the framework within the starter kit. Then, you can dive deeper if you want by taking our 4-Week Training Sprint that provides more extensive details, actions and activities to advance your knowledge and capacity for activating sustainability in business. 

The framework was developed by Dr. Leyla Acaroglu and draws on her years of experience in conducting environmental impact assessments and supporting businesses through their sustainability journey. The framework has three main components, providing a more holistic perspective of where impacts occur and how they can be addressed —  all assembled into an easy-to-follow, 3-step framework. 

STEP 1: UNDERSTAND IMPACTS 

This section of the toolkit provides an overview of the impact areas; operations, products and experiences. There are 18 common domains for consideration from energy, waste and water to direction and engagement of your customers. At each of these business areas there are impacts occurring and opportunities to design more sustainability outcomes. Assessing them illuminates these impact areas and gives you a starting point for recognizing the opportunities you have to make change.

STEP 2: ASSESS IMPACTS

After you've started to understand and identify the impacts your organization has, you can move to a more detailed assessment phase in order to develop your first set of benchmarks to understand current impacts and have a baseline to measure future progress against. There are many ways of assessing impacts in detail, but our 3D framework offers three main tools for assessment: sustainable supply chains, environmental auditing and sustainable design strategies. The starter kit provides you with simple worksheets to get you started. Our online learning system also offers a more advanced toolkit included in the 4-week sprint. 

STEP 3: TAKE ACTION

Post-assessment, the final section of the toolkit helps you set goals and clear pathways for change, as well as develop policies and create action plans that activate your reporting and promote continual improvement on your sustainability journey.

Remember, sustainability is a process of transformation, with many untapped opportunities just waiting for you to uncover them. In the final section of the toolkit, we offer up our self-assessment tool that provides you with a place to continually check your progress and encourage you toward your sustainability goals. 

Whatever you are at now, just starting out or leading the way, your current position should not be the end of your actions — it’s the beginning. The journey to a better future is always ongoing.

6 Focused Learning Categories to Boost your Change-Making Skills

Here at The UnSchool, there’s a handful of things that we never stop talking about: making positive creative change, embracing systems thinking, normalizing sustainability, igniting the circular economy, leveraging the Disruptive Design Method, and finally, diving into Cognitive Science by hacking our brains, mindsets and biases so that we can all expand our sphere of influence and active our agency to make massive sustainable changes to the way we live on this beautiful planet we all share!!!

When we started this experimental knowledge lab in 2014, we did so with the intent to give others the tools they needed to disrupt the status quo and solve complex problems in order to make the future work better for us all. Now that we’ve been fully operational for almost 7 years, having transferred knowledge to thousands of change-makers like you all around the world, run fellowships in 10 countries (!), and created >80 offerings at UnSchool Online, we decided to organize our courses, toolkits and ebooks into the themed-knowledge areas that we focus on the most. 

Our six brand new learning categories — Systems Thinking, Sustainability, Circular Economy, Creative Change, Disruptive Design, Cognitive Science — are designed to help you find what you need more efficiently and take a more targeted approach to refining your creative change-making skill set. Whether you are brand new to the world of making change or you’re a leader in creative change, we have offerings that can help you build your knowledge bank, refine your skillset, and amplify your impact. These new learning categories are simply like destinations on your change-making journey map, and we’ll step you through where to go based on where you are right now. 

Over the next few weeks, we’ll spotlight each of the new learning categories here in our journal to help give you a better understanding of why these focused areas are so important not only to us — but for your work, too. Stay tuned! 

PS: Speaking of knowledge transfer, have you browsed our recently upgraded Free Resource Library lately? It’s packed with brain-activating content (like Leyla’s Decade of Disruption report, or The Circular Classroom or Sustainability in Business!)  and practical tools (like the Superpower Activation Kit, the Circular Redesign Kit, and our personal Post Disposable Kit!) that you can utilize right away.

Business Sustainability Activation October Training Program

MEET OUR NEW SUSTAINABILITY IN BUSINESS TRAINING PROGRAMS!

For many years we have been working with organizations of all sizes to help them identify and integrate sustainability into their processes, practices and organizational DNA, and now we are excited to share a diverse range of programs dedicated to helping advance and activate sustainability into business processes and structure!

Our new courses range from an introductory level course through to 101, 102 and 103 series of leveling up. They are designed to support organizational change and offer any sized business the tools needed to identify, design and reconfigure into a circular, sustainable and climate positive business. The series will be released over the next few months and to kick off, we have a 1-month live intensive with Dr. Leyla Acaroglu happening in October! This program is the perfect starting point for anyone who wishes to help transform their business at an operational level into one that has conscious and considered impacts. Find out more about the program, who its best suited for and our full series here in this week’s journal.

What IS the live program is all about?

This program is designed for professionals from a variety of backgrounds and industries who want to gain the full-spectrum understanding of sustainability in business operations.

This is an immersive knowledge-building program for managers, HR specialists and business development teams wanting to advance through sustainability.

This week-long immersive is divided up into 3 main live knowledge sessions and activations during the week, offering up a detailed introduction to sustainability in the workplace program.

We designed this workshop for anyone who is interested in understanding how to take action within a business context to introduce sustainable and carbon-positive actions.

The topics covered include:

• Sustainability — what it is, is not and how to do it well. Included in this is an overview of all the aspects, from climate change to recycling and the circular economy to gain a clear overview of all the terms and concepts that apply to sustainability, carbon-positive workplaces and the circular economy

• An overview of business sustainability concepts, current must-haves for engaging with this transformation and case studies of organizations taking action 

• Which forces are influencing sustainability in the workplace and the business risks associated with inaction 

• How sustainability affects business and workplaces, and the practical actions you can take to eliminate impacts and build a more sustainable business

• The trend toward workers demanding sustainability from organizations, along with theories and approaches to making positive change within your organization

• Life cycle thinking and understanding the supply chain; design and manufacturing of products you make and also consume, which supports base-case assessment, design changes, and also procurement choices

• Material impacts and decisions around business activities, such as waste and energy services, as you discover how to use environmental impact assessment in ways that support better decision-making and reduce costs

• How to write an environmental plan/policy, do a self-assessment, take action and create products and services for the circular economy

• Business ethics and leadership tools for engaging your people in effective, respectful and motivating ways, with action checklists and support in writing environmental policies and reporting

If you are an executive, manager, decision-maker, and leader who is working within an organization and are keen to start your sustainability journey, this course will help you get your head around all the policies, procedures, decisions and pitfalls of taking action for a carbon-positive future. 

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“The Disruptive Design workshop far exceeded my expectations. The content has given me a practical way to delve into complex problems, exploring thinking far beyond my normal lines of inquiry, and to surface new areas for intervention and innovative ways of designing those interventions. Everyone who is tackling systems should learn this.”

— Catriona McLagan, New Zealand Senior Policy Advisor, Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment

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Why SHOULD YOU take this workshop?

This is a knowledge-building skill development program for people wanting to integrate sustainability decision making into their workplace. 

The content is designed to support the rapid uptake of core concepts, tools and approaches to integrating sustainability into decision making, facilitating the transition toward operating more sustainably, and providing the tools that enable this to happen within your organization. 

This program is specifically focused on understanding the fundamentals of what sustainability is and how it applies to your business and the workplace, along with providing very practical action kits, details on how to write environmental policies and a regulation checker. 

The goal is to provide the framework for you to get started within your organization, no matter what industry you are in or how far along your sustainability journey you already are. Its practical, actionable and easy to digest in a short period of time. 

By the time you have taken this program, we will have launched our brand new Sustainability in Business Series, along with our 12 Steps to Sustainability Challenge, all of which which offer practical roadmaps to organizational change.

Sustainability can be complex and overwhelming at times; understanding the difference between the terminology, methods and assessment tools and then deciding what works best for your industry and scenario are all considerations that managers and senior leaders face. 

The October workshop lays out the core concepts, tools and actions you can take to ensure you are activating a sustainable and ethical approach to doing business. 

Led by Dr. Leyla Acaroglu, UNEP Champion of the Earth, Designer, Sociologist and UnSchool founder, her expertise in sustainability and tools for the circular economy allows for a rapid uptake and understanding of the core considerations that anyone working to affect change within an organization needs to know. 

“Over 200 of the world’s largest firms estimated that climate change would cost them a combined total of nearly US$1 trillion in the case of nonaction. At the same time, there is broad recognition among these same firms that there are significant economic opportunities, provided the right strategies are put in place.”

— The Global Risks Report 2020

A sneak peek at the rest of the series

The Business in Sustainability Program series encompasses many aspects of integrating and transforming organizations to be sustainable and circular. From general operational impacts through to system-wide transformation, each program has been curated to support a different level organizational shift.

September will see the release of our new Sustainability in Business Series, starting off with the Introductory course.

Our introduction course helps you assess where you are and covers the basics to get yourself or team on the same page. We offer a self-assessment tool to see where you are at and identify the next steps, along with sharing inspirational case studies from a variety of industries and the growing trends around the world.

The 101 course focuses on the operational level, covering topics such as audits, inputs and outputs; 102 covers the financial aspects of sustainability in business to make the case for change and upskill in ways to do so; 103 covers the broader systems thinking for carbon and future positive workspaces, looking at the bigger pictures and establishing leadership paths forward. We will also be offering an executive-level course in the future to leverage and build leadership in the sustainability for a business context, as well as an engaging and motivational 12 Step Organizational Challenge.

INTRODUCTION PROGRAM

Basic Training

Kick off your transformation by uncovering the core concepts and approaches to sustainability in business, and be inspired by diverse industry case studies as well as map your action plan:

• Part 1: Sustainability and Circular Economy Transformation in Business 

• Part 2: Case Studies of Sustainability Initiatives in Business

• Part 3: Leadership and Activating Change

Sustainability in Business 101

Operational Training

The 101 program covers all the core aspects of operational impacts, exploring the energy, waste water and procurement aspects of general operations, as well as providing actions for upskilling in life cycle thinking and green supply chain development.

• Part 1: Sustainability and Business Operational Impacts 

• Part 2: Assessing Operational Areas of Impact 

• Part 3: Supply Chains, Carbon Emissions and Life Cycle Thinking

Sustainability in Business 102

Financial Training

The 102 program dives deeper into the economic impacts of sustainability in business, such as the financial risks, opportunities, and strategies for taking on the challenges and leadership roles in this global movement. The world is changing - fast - and positioning yourself and your organization for employability and resilience will be critical for successful and sustainable growth in the years to come.

• Part 1: Materials and Waste Streams

• Part 2: Developing Policies and Procedures

• Part 3: Corporate Governance and Financial Reporting

Sustainability in Business 103

Systems Training

The 103 program looks at the bigger picture and supports decision-making for systems level change within the workplace context. Level up with carbon and future positive initiatives, build leadership skills for internal and external momentum, understand sustainable design strategies and create products and services that fit into the circular economy.

• Part 1: Transitioning to The Circular Economy

• Part 2: Systems Thinking in Business Decision Making

• Part 3: Business Ethics, Integrity and Theory of Change

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Executive Training

The Executive Training Program is an advanced sustainability leadership track that includes deep knowledge on systems wide transformation, adaptation to circular principles and operational impact assessment. Set an example for your employees and your industry in a way that both builds your business, while also establishes the norms for a more positive, regenerative and resilient industry. Get ahead of the curve and be a leader in your space.

Team Challenges

Any individual can take on the challenge for themselves or implicate their colleagues into the challenge for a fun and interactive way to increase their impact and influence. This is a great initiative for HR managers and executives to invite their employees to take part in, incentivizing participation and encouraging everyone to come along for the ride as your organization scales up its efforts toward increasing and meeting sustainability goals.

Looking for custom content?

All our standard courses are fully customizable to your organizational needs. We offer bulk subscription discounts and can develop specific and customized content for your industry, as well as provide motivational live sessions with our lead educator Leyla Acaroglu, or executive coaching and advice services to ensure your company-wide success.

“This masterclass has definitely stretched my brain. My brain does hurt but it was absolutely worth it. My work will be less stressful now that I can sift through my messy brain. Thank you for saying it’s okay to procrastinate and that it helps, and thank you for reminding me that we need to be more compassionate because we need more people to adhere to sustainability in order to make the world better. We just can’t do it alone.”

— Group Sustainability & CSR Executive at The Lux Collective, Evita Fakun

Earth Overshoot Day & Your Ecological Footprint

Earth Overshoot Day

Every year the Global Footprint Network marks on the calendar a date that signifies the day we have collectively used up all the resources allocated for that year. It’s called Earth Overshoot Day, and in 2020, it falls on the 22nd of August. This is actually much better than 2019’s date, which was the 29th of July. This shift in a more sustainable direction is mainly due to the economic slow down as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Adapted from Earth Overshoot Day, last year we were a month behind this year.

The Global Footprint Network combines the most reliable data available and forms a set of reasonable assumptions to assess the current resource use of humanity. They look at changes in carbon emissions, harvesting of forest products, food production and fossil fuel demand, along with other factors that have an impact on global biocapacity. The research team concluded that this year, as a result of the global pandemic, there has been a 9.3% reduction in the global Ecological Footprint compared to the same period last year, as reported on the Earth Overshoot Day website.

“The novel coronavirus pandemic has caused humanity’s ecological footprint to contract. However, true sustainability that allows all to thrive on Earth can only be achieved by design, not disaster.” - Earth Overshoot Day

The changes reported by the World Footprint Network as a result of changes to the economy from the Covid-19 pandemic

Your Ecological Footprint

Earth Overshoot Day brings awareness to one of the main issues that sustainability is seeking to address: we collectively consume more than the Earth can provide us with. Everything comes from nature, and the planet provides us with an abundance of resources, from minerals to shelter and food. 

But since the early 1980s, we started to extract and use more resources at a rate faster than the Earth can replenish them each year. This means we are eating into future generations resources and creating a deficit. Thus we need to find creative ways of meeting our human needs, living prosperous lives, but whilst maintaining and respecting the life support systems that sustain life on Earth.

The ecological footprint methodology is a tool that helps individuals, cities, countries, and the entire world understand how big an impact they have on the one planet we all share. The eco footprint method looks at many 'impact categories', which are areas of our daily lives that have impacts on the planet and then provides a calculation of how many earths would be required if everyone lived your lifestyle. So the place you live, the types of things you consume - these all impact the size of your personal ecological footprint.

In part inspired by the ecological footprint concept, last year in collaboration with the United Nations Environment Programme, we came up with the Anatomy of Action - a set of actions everyone, anywhere, can take to live a more sustainable lifestyle. Using the hand as a memorable reference for the actions we each take in our lives, we can opt to reduce our footprint by making more effective lifestyle choices that reduce the impact of our actions.

Move the date

Each year there is a campaign is to #movethedate for Earth Overshoot Day so we can get back in line with the Earth’s ability to sustain us. The last time this was the case was in the late 1970’s, so we need to collectively move the date back to December 31st, so that we are living within the carrying capacity of the planet.

In honor of Earth Overshoot Day, we challenge you to measure your own ecological footprint and see what kind of present impacts your lifestyle is having on the planet.

From the Earth Overshoot Day website, the lifestyle areas that we can change to help #movethedate

Did you know that currently, we need 1.6 planets to sustain the consumption and lifestyle choices of all the humans alive today!? “From 1961 to 2010, Ecological Footprint accounts indicate that human demand for renewable resources and ecological services increased by nearly 140% “ says a report on our growing ecological footprint.

This is our collective impact, but what is your individual footprint? Click on the image below to do the calculation and see! Then check out the Anatomy of Action to find ways you can reduce your impact and help design a more sustainable future.

Lets take action!

At the UnSchool we are all about agentzing people to help design a future that works better than today, we have classes, handbooks, toolkits, advanced learning tracks and masterclasses all on activating systems change for a sustainable and circular future.

As for the gift, to celebrate Earth Overshoot Day being moved back nearly a month this year, we’re having a 24-hour, 50% off Flash Sale on everything* at UnSchools Online, on this Saturday, 22 August!

Use the code MOVETHEDATE when you checkout, and get 50% off anything in our extensive online learning hub.

Help #MoveTheDate by activating your agency and contributing to making positive change with tools on sustainability, systems thinking, creative problem solving, and more at UnSchools Online!

*for certification tracks this applies to the first month only

Free Sustainable Design and Circular Economy Toolkits

By Leyla Acaroglu

Over the years, my team and I have created a range of free, open-access toolkits to support change-makers in adopting the skills needed to help transform the global economy into a circular and sustainable one by design. 

Here I have assembled some of my favorite ones and a list of what we have created for anyone wanting to get started on activating change for free!

Through my design agency, Disrupt Design, my small team and I take commissions to make tools and self-initiate our own designs to help make change, wherever we can we get our clients and collaborators to allow for 20–100% of the content to be free and open access. We ourselves are committed to having a minimum 20% of our content open-source and free for all. 

Many of these toolkits would not have been made possible without the financial support of forward-thinking companies and organizations who see the value in creating beautiful and accessible content. So thanks! And if you are one of them, reach out to see what great things we can create together! 

The Circular Classroom 

We collaborated with the Walki Group, Co-Founders and the Finnish Education System to develop engaging and practical in-class resources on the circular economy, sustainability and creativity.

The Circular Classroom is a free, trilingual (English, Finnish + Swedish) educational resource for students and teachers alike. It is designed to integrate circular thinking into high school classrooms, all packaged up in a fun, beautiful format of video and workbooks.

The intention behind the project is to support young people in recognizing the exciting opportunity that redesigning products, services and systems have for the future, for exploring how their engagement with the world today impacts the future, and for supporting their decisions around future professions.

This commissioned project is designed to activate the circular economy in Scandinavia. The 3-part circular education program for high school students is available for free online in English, Finnish and Swedish. It is designed to be integrated into the Finnish high school curriculum, and is applicable globally.

The interactive video series and workbook toolkits includes an Educators’ ‘How To’ manual, as through our discovery workshops, we learned that students were very interested in this information, but the teachers felt they didn’t have the knowledge base to deliver it. This program is designed for co-learning between students and educators and includes 15 interactive educational activities.

www.circularclassroom.com

Circular Redesign Workshop Toolkit 

The Circular Economy Workshop Redesign Toolkit was inspired by years of running workshops with companies and organizations that want to embrace sustainable design, life cycle thinking and the circular economy.

We developed this over time when needing our own workshop facilitation tools, and then decided to put it together with instructions and make it open source so others can facilitate their own! 

Download the full toolkit here >

The Anatomy of Action 

A collaboration with the United Nations Environment Program, this project’s ambitious goal was to make sustainable living irresistible. To do this, we identified academically-validated lifestyle actions that will make a measurable change when amplified across communities. 

A year-long research study we conducted resulted in 5 key areas of impact and recommendations, which we turned into a momentum-building mixed media campaign called the Anatomy of Action.

This open-source project includes three videos, a downloadable toolkit to custom adapt to the local context, 350+ social shareable hand-drawn graphics, a 150-page data validation report, and a custom website. Within 15 days of the launch (still ongoing), there were 19k views, 3,500 toolkit downloads and 100+ countries who engaged, translating the graphics and data into multiple languages.

anatomyofaction.org

Post Disposable Activation Kit 

Your everyday actions can help to seed a movement that will dramatically and quickly reduce the massive environmental and social burdens that disposability has led us to, and help activate a global shift to a future that has positive outcomes for the entire planet. 

This requires all of us to embrace #POSTDISPOSABLE change! We have created a set of free tools to help you activate your leadership and make lifestyle shifts for a post disposable future! Become a citizen designer and help activate positive change now. Available in Spanish, Hindi & English. 

Check out the toolkit here > 

Superpower Activation Kit 

When I was named Champion of the Earth by the UN in 2016, we were inspired to create a toolkit of the everyday actions we can all take to activate our agency for a sustainable and just planet. That's how the Superpower Activation Kit was born! 

We put together this toolkit of everyday superpowers so every active citizen of the world who wants to participate with more purpose in the construction of the systems around them can do so. The 12 powers are based on a wealth of scientific data in our Disruptive Design Method, and the toolkit provides practical advice on how to activate them.

Download the toolkit here > 

Change Makers Lab Card Game 

As part of our 20% open source content policy, we have designed a fun hands-on toolkit that shares a series of activities designed for the Change Makers Lab created for SEAC Thailand. 

In this pack you get a full card game pack in Thai and English as a series of over 21 games to play with them focused on sustainability, systems thinking, active citizenship and making change.

Download the toolkit here >

Disruptive Design Workshop Facilitation Kit 

Expanding upon our skillset in experiential education and transformative change, we created this 65-page digital toolkit for Oxfam Asia. The guide was designed after a two-day Disrupt Design Activating Equity and Digital Activism workshop in Bangkok with Oxfam, along with 40 invited creative and media partners.

The goal was to create a step by step guide they could use within Oxfam to run workshops that help them design more effective campaigns to move people from knowledge to action. Chapters cover everything from ethical research to stakeholder engagement, systems mapping and creative communication decisions.

Download the toolkit here >

QUICK LINKS TO CONTENT

Circular Classroom (Finnish collab)
Anatomy of Action (UN collab)
UnSchool Open Source Kits & Classes
Disrupt Design Medium
UnSchool Journal
Fellowship Journals

Intro to the Disruptive Design Method
The ChangeMakers Lab Gard Game Kit
The Circular Classroom
The Post Disposable Activation Kit
Circular Economy ReDesign Workshop Kit
Superpower Activation Kit

Quick Guide to Circular Economy Business Strategies

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

The Circular Economy is all about the transformation of the way we do business, create goods and services, organize society and ultimately respect and cherish the world around us. Moving from a linear to a circular economy requires a reconfiguration of nearly all business structures, which is where circular business strategies come into play.

In my quick guide series, I am providing an overview of the different decision making support tools that enable the transformation to a circular and sustainable society. We are all consumers in the current linear economy, but as we transition to one that massively reduces waste and instead promotes a variety of reuse approaches, we will each become shareholders in the delivery and cycling of goods and services throughout the economy. This requires a redesign of nearly everything, and the sustainable design decisions I outlined already cross over with these sustainable business strategies as they interlock to provide a pathway form linear to circular. Like any strategy, there is no one size fits all solution and there are new ideas and approaches being designed and tested in more detail as we see the advancement of this transformation.

As individuals, as governments and as organizations, we already encourage or discourage industries, services and products based on what we invest in and thus support, in our time, energy and money. If you are someone who works for a company and makes decisions, then you definitely need to understand how the economy is currently transforming and what the new types of business models are evolving to service the in-demand need for a resource-efficient, equitable, sustainable and circular world.

As we enter into this new green recovery stage, there are many businesses in need of reconfiguration, pivots and performance changes, where the standard business models, policies, products, and services just don't fit any longer. In order to meet the growing demand for sustainable and circular products and the political shifts towards equitable industries, companies need to come to terms with these new approaches to making money whilst also making good.

“Circular business models modify the pattern of product and material flows through the economy.” — OECD Business Model for Circular Economy Report

Within a circular economy, goods cycle through two main types of metabolism flows. One is the technical system, which includes all the human-made, technically-altered goods, and these must be designed to be recaptured, reused, repaired, remanufactured and where appropriate recycled, in order to ensure material values are maximized and technical products don't escape into the natural environment — which leads us to the other main metabolism, the biological one. This encompasses all the goods and materials that are biologically based and can easily and benignly be metabolized back into nature. All food products, for example, are biological, while all food packaging that has any technical additions like plastic is in the technical stream.

Many of the ecological impacts, the externalities that we see in the economy, have come about as a result of supply chain relationships — not just the end-of- life destination where things end up. Yet, much of our investment and activation for change thus far has been around waste management, rather than on designing out waste from the system right from the start. In part, the circular economy is trying to address this by providing pathways for full systems redesign, rather than just end-of-life tweaks.

The global economy is designed around the consumption of goods and services, so much so that the measurement tool we use to determine the success of nations, the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), only measures the things produced and sold in a country. It ignores the losses from the systems that it takes from, such as nature, ignores any activities that have no economic aspect to them and ultimately creates a very narrow view of value and wealth. GDP is a massive system failure as it externalizes all ecological impacts. This way of measuring the economy is only 70 years old, and it has helped to create many of the environmental issues that plague us today.

GDP is one of the driving forces that created the global linear economy, whereby every day millions of tons of raw materials are extracted from nature (through mining, harvesting, cropping, etc.); these are mechanically processed into usable goods in factories, shipped around the world, and then purchased, used up, and thrown out. When things are discarded, they often end up in landfills, incinerators or dumps, or worse they escape back into nature in harmful ways because they were only ever designed to maximize the benefits to the producers and not to consider the full life cycle impacts that they may have. Waste in all its forms is a byproduct of this linear system, whereas in nature, there is no such thing as waste; our species has created pollution of all sorts. This has created a huge strain on the waste and recycling systems, of which are currently broken, resulting in many ecological, equity and health implications, and created the demand for transforming the way we do business, meet human needs and structure the entire economy.

As we progress to the normalization and integration of the circular approaches, pioneering leadership is required from governments and CEOs, as well as the creative thinkers who can help shift the status quo through designing new things that make the old polluting, degrading, inequitable systems obsolete. We are starting to see this, with many of the world's biggest companies committing to adopting circularity, carbon reduction, and sustainable design strategies.

We can speed up the needed change by incentivizing producers to approach product and business design differently — to use sustainable design approaches and life cycle assessment to help green supply chains and find unique ways of shifting the status quo on hyper-consumerism through the implementation of closed-loop product delivery models.

“Circular business models are special in the sense that they look for value creation in places usually of little interest to companies that operate in the traditional linear production paradigm”. — Guldmann, Best Practice Examples of Circular Business Models

The future is circular, not just in the wider economy, but also in our daily lives. As we become more aware of the impact of our actions, we are more incentivized and agentized to make informed and effective decisions. We can no longer avoid the reality that our planet is in need of better care. The linear economy has helped us advance to this incredible point in time, but the advancement has come at major costs to the ecological systems that sustain life on Earth, which in turn affects our health and quality of life as we battle climate change, air pollution, global pandemics and loss of biodiversity. These issues are all interconnected, and until we change the way we do things, we will continue to be the victims of our own poor decisions.

The circular economy is seeking to remedy this through shifts in the way we arrange society, the way we produce goods and services, and the way we all consume, in order to ultimately design the kind of future we want to live in. One that is equitable, sustainable and regenerative by design.

Before we dive into the business models that are part of this transformation, let’s quickly cover some of the key concepts that are central to the circular shift.

Circular Economy Core Concepts

It's important to know that the movement for the transformation to a closed-loop circular economy has been well underway for several decades. Work at multiple levels of research, industry and government has been ongoing to advance the idea of product stewardship, cleaner production and extended producer responsibility. Here are the main overarching concepts that fit within the circular economy:

• Product Stewardship: The parent company of the design, production and sales takes full responsibility for reducing the environmental impact of the product they create throughout the entire life cycle of the product, ensuring that there are appropriate end-of-life options and that these are managed by the parent company.

• Extended Producer Responsibility: A policy approach whereby all of the full life-cycle environmental costs associated with a product are added to the final sale price, and this extra revenue is used to manage the product stewardship of the product.

• Eco Design: Approaches to designing products so that they last longer and have a limited impact on the environment across their full life cycle. This is also called sustainable design, and I have a quick guide to this here too.

• Cleaner Producer: A preventative measure by companies to reduce the waste and pollution associated with the production of goods.

• Industrial Ecology: Ways of remodelling industrial systems to perform more like ecological ones and maximize value exchange.

• Industrial Symbiosis: Part of industrial ecology, a network of diverse organizations collaborate to ensure that resources are used efficiently and value is cycled between them.

• Waste Equals Food: An approach where all ‘waste’ becomes a nutrient to something else in the system.

• Non-Fossil Energy: Energy derived from renewable resources.

• True-Cost Accounting: A type of accounting that takes into consideration the full externalities and costs associated with delving a service, doing business, or creating a product.

• Cradle to cradle: A concept of ensuring that the full life of a product is managed in a sustainable way that was made popular in a book of the same name and has a certification system for products.

• Biomimicry: An approach to creating products and services that mimic the way nature works by studying and replicating the solutions found in the natural world.

• Regenerative Design: A whole systems approach to creating solutions that offer back more than is taken in their creation by exploring the way natural systems solve problems and creating things that are interconnected with natural systems.

• Post Disposable: A movement to make waste obsolete by designing solutions that move beyond waste as a socially acceptable concept.

• Life Cycle Thinking: A framework that takes into consideration the whole of life environmental impacts of a product or service by looking at the impacts that actions in the economy have on natural systems by looking from the cradle to grave. I have a guide to this here.

• Disruptive Design: Disruptive Design is a way for creatives and non-creatives alike to develop the mental tools to activate positive change by mining through problems, employing a divergent array of research approaches, moving through systems thinking, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact.

• Systems Thinking: Systems thinking is a holistic approach to understanding the way parts fit together in dynamic relationships to make up a whole system. It’s the opposite of reductive or linear thinking and involves a series of practical approaches and mental models that enable a more complex view of the world, focusing on relationships and synthesis.

• Closing the loop: This Is a concept promoted by some businesses as a solution to waste generation and in support of the circular economy. By closing the loop on the end-of-life impacts of a product from the design stage, the business can be redesigned to support end- to-end integrated systems.

• Technical nutrients: Materials or stocks that are manipulated by humans and cannot be easily re-integrated into nature (for example, plastics).

• Biological nutrients: Materials or stocks that can be easily absorbed or digested by natural systems in a benign way (unbleached paper or food).

• Metabolism rate: The ability for things to be reabsorbed or integrated into a system — food waste, for example, can be easily metabolized in a compost bin or biodigester, whereas it does not get effectively metabolized in a landfill.

• Zero waste: This is a strategy and movement to go beyond waste reduction and remove all disposable products from a place, company or lifestyle by embracing a set of strategies that eliminate waste completely. The goal is to avoid sending any waste to a landfill or incinerator.

(There are many more! I have a class that covers all of this in way more detail coming out soon, and we also have a gamified toolkit that asks these questions and helps you get to a sustainable outcome — see here)

Circular Economy Business Models

The types of business model transformations that are underway and will become more prevalent in the near future include different approaches to closing the loop so that end-to-end material flows are managed by the producers. The burden of waste is not transferred to the end-user, but instead, the company has stewardship over their products for its full life cycle and designs products to be recaptured to ensure that the values of the materials and embodied impacts are maximized.

Every industry and product category will need a different combination of business and design approaches, as some materials are easily re-metabolized and some aren't, some product categories are much simpler than others, etc. The fundamental shift here is how we design goods to flow through the economy and the responsibility that producers take of their goods, enabling customers to return, reuse, or repair to ensure that value is continually increased.

REPAIR

Designing products to have extended life spans by providing repair services and maximizing likelihood of repair during use and end of life phases.

REMANUFACTURE

Creating within a closed-loop system where products are intentionally intended to be taken back, reconditioned or fed back into the production cycle to create new high value products.

RESELL

The resale or buyback of products are encouraged, supporting the continuation of the functionality and increasing the usable life span.

SHARING PLATFORMS

The creation of service provisions within a product context to maximize the reuse and shareability of the goods.

WASTE AS A RESOURCE

Products are designed to intentionally use others’ byproducts or to ensure that their own byproducts are absorbed into a new system.

PRODUCT AS SERVICE MODEL

Products are reimagined into service delivery models, and long-term relationships are built with the customers. Products are always owned by the producer and leased to the customer thus they can be made of higher value and managed across their entire life.

CIRCULAR SUPPLIES

Products are part of the supply model, and consumers collaborate to share resources and ensure that circular products are available on the market.

RESOURCE RECOVERY

Mining landfills or extracting materials back from the economy to ensure that they are circulated back into the system. This could be a third party provided system.

PRODUCT LIFE EXTENSION

Challenging the traditional model of lots of customers buying individual units by offering higher value longer-term products and ensuring they are utilized. Perhaps with a pay per use model of another way of ensuring that materials stay in the economy longer.

But wait, there are more strategies!

There are actually many more considerations and opportunities that apply to different stages, product categories and the level of change you are at. I have created a free toolkit for circular redesign to walk you through a quick creative process.

If you want to learn more about this, we have an introductory class on the circular economy, many resources and several handbooks on Circular Systems Design that dive into this in more detail. I also host a group on LinkedIn for people working in systems change. Additionally, we are launching an extensive set of programs and services for businesses interested in advancing their skills in this arena as part of a new set of programs and masterclasses designed for business transformation.

A Quick Guide to Sustainable Design Strategies

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

Sustainable design is the approach to creating products and services that have considered the environmental, social, and economic impacts from the initial phase through to the end of life. EcoDesign is a core tool in the matrix of approaches that enables the Circular Economy.

There is a well-quoted statistic that says around 80% of the ecological impacts of a product are locked in at the design phase. If you look at the full life cycle of a product and the potential impacts it may have, be it in the manufacturing or at the end of life stage, the impacts are inadvertently decided and thus embedded in the product by the designers, at the design decision-making stage.

This makes some uncomfortable, but design and product development teams are responsible for the decisions that they make when contemplating, prototyping, and ultimately producing a product into existence. And thus, they are implicated in the environmental and social impacts that their creations have on the world. The design stage is a perfect and necessary opportunity to find unique and creative ways to get sustainable and circular goods and services out into the economy to replace the polluting and disposable ones that flood the market today. The challenge is which designers will pick up the call to action and start to change the status quo of an industry addicted to mass-produced, fast-moving, disposable goods?

For those that are ready to make positive change and be apart of the transition to a circular and sustainable economy by design, the good news is there is a well-established range of tools and techniques that a designer or product development decision-maker can employ to ensure that a created product is meeting its functional and market needs in ways that dramatically reduce negative impacts on people and the planet. These are known as ecodesign or sustainable design strategies, and whilst they have been around for a while, the demand for such considerations is even more prominent as the movement toward a sustainable, circular economy increases.

Sustainability, at its core, is simply about making sure that what we use and how we use it today, doesn’t have negative impacts on current and future generations' ability to live prosperously on this planet. Its also about ensuring we are meeting our needs in socially just, environmentally positive and economically viable ways, so its very much a design challenge. Consumption is a major driver of unsustainability, and all consumer goods are designed in some way.

When sustainability is applied to design, it enlightens us to the impacts that the product will have across its full life cycle, enabling the creator to ensure that all efforts have been made to produce a product that fits within the system it will exist within in a sustainable way, that it offers a higher value than what was lost in its making, and that it does not intentionally break or be designed to be discarded when it is no longer useful. Provisions should have been made so that there are options for how to maximize its value across its full life cycle and keep materiality in a value flow. This is otherwise known now as the circular economy and the practice of enabling this is circular systems design.

Long before there was a Twitter hashtag devoted to all things sustainability, sustainable design pioneers like Buckminster Fuller and Victor Papanek were figuring out how to reduce the impact of produced goods and services through design. As the sustainability concept has evolved, so has the framework for the thinking and doing tools that we now can routinely integrate into our practices to help understand and design out impacts and design in higher value. I see sustainable design as one of the tools that we each need to employ in order to make things better, its the practical side of considering sustainability, connected to considerations around life cycle thinking, systems thinking, circular thinking and regenerative design. By understanding these approaches, a toolbox for change can be created by any practitioner to advance their ability to create incredible things that offer back more than they take. This should be the goal of any creative development.

The ecodesign strategy set for sustainable design includes techniques like Design for Disassembly, Design for Longevity, Design for Reusability, Design for Dematerialization, and Design for Modularity, among many other approaches that we will run through in this quick guide. Basically, the ecodesign strategy toolset helps us think through the way something will exist and how to design for value increases whilst also maintaining functionality, aesthetics, and practicality of products, systems, and services. It’s especially effective when applying materiality to any of the creative interventions you are pursuing in your changemaking practice, be it a designer or not. We have a free toolkit for redesigning products to be circular that also details all of these strategies, and more.

For decades, much progressive experimentation and exploration of ecodesign, cleaner production, industrial ecology, product stewardship, life cycle thinking, and sustainable production and consumption has occurred, which all led up to the current framing of a new approach to humans meeting their needs in ways that don’t destroy the systems needed to sustain us. Right now the framing is around creating a sustainable, regenerative, and circular economy, whereby the things we create to meet our needs are designed to fit with the systems of the planet and maintain materials in benign or beneficial flows within the economy, which requires businesses to change the way they deliver value and consumers to adjust their expectations around hyper-consumerism. Central to this success is the design of goods and services and that's where these strategies and designers' creativity fit in.

There have been thousands of academic articles and business case studies on a multitude of different approaches to sustainable and ethical business practices, demonstrating the strong and clear need for systems-level change. Contributions from biomimicry, cradle to cradle, product service systems (PSS) models, eco-design strategies, life cycle assessment, eco-efficiency and the waste hierarchy all fit together to support this approach to sustainable design.

The Circular Economy

Within the last 20 or so years, we have really started to feel the negative impacts of what's called the linear economy, where raw materials are extracted from nature, turned into usable goods, purchased and then quickly discarded usually due to poor design choices, inferior materials or trend changes (or the more insidious practice of planned obsolescence). Recently, there has been a great framing around the shift from linear to circular systems called The Circular Economy Framework, which combines a range of pre-existing theories and approaches. Moving to a circular economy (which embraces closed-loop and sustainable production systems) means that the end of life of products is considered at the start, and the entire life cycle impacts are designed to offer new opportunities, not wasteful outcomes.

Our interpretation of the value flows within the circular economy from the Circular Systems Design handbook.

You may be wondering — especially if you aren’t a designer — how can we integrate this into a creative practice to make a positive change? Well, here’s the thing, the approaches to understanding and reducing the impacts of material processes are really important to reduce the use of global materials and the ecological impacts of our production and consumption choices. This is what the circular economy movement is seeking to achieve: a transformation in the way we meet our material needs.

On top of that, these approaches are very empowering for non-material decisions — you start to see the ways in which the world works and can apply this thinking to different problem sets. Sustainable design and production techniques allow for reducing the material impact by maximizing systems in service design — thus, providing sustainability during both production and consumption.

From our free educational project, The Circular Classroom. Find out more here

EcoDesign Strategies

These sustainable design strategies are best known as starting off with Victor Papanek in the 1970’s and have been contributed to over the years by many different people and approaches. This curated life of ‘design for x’ strategies takes into consideration the circular economy and how they relate to closing the loop and dramatically changing economic models.

In this list I have curated, I have also included a few “negative” design approaches at the end to remind you what not to do, and how easy it is to accidentally do the wrong thing right, rather than the right thing a little bit wrong.

In order to achieve circular and sustainable design, some, or many, of these design considerations need to be employed in combination throughout the design process in order to ensure that the outcome is not just a reinterpretation of the status quo, but something that actually challenges and changes the way we meet our needs.

These approaches are lenses you apply to the creative process in order to challenge and allow for the emergence of new ways to deliver functionality and value within the economy. There are also separate considerations of the circularization process outlined in the next section.

Product Service Systems (PSS) Models

One of the main ideas of the circular economy is moving from single-use products to products that fit within a beautifully designed and integrated closed-loop system which is enabled through this approach. Think of alternatives to purchasable products such as leasable items that exist as part of a company-owned system or services that enable reuse. Leasing a product out — rather than selling it directly — allows the company to manage the product across its entire life cycle, so it can be designed to easily fit back into a pre-designed recycling or re-manufacturer system, all whilst reducing waste.

By transitioning away from single end-consumer product design to these PSS models, the relationship shifts and the responsibility for the packaging and product itself is shared between the producer and the consumer. This incentivizes each agent to maintain the value of the product and to design it so that it’s long-lasting and durable. PSS requires the conceptualization of meeting functional needs within a closed system that the producer manages in order to minimize waste and maximize value gains after each cycling of the product. Many of the circular economy business models are either based on this concept or create services that enable the ownership of the product to be maintained by the company and leased to the customer. But it’s critical that this is done within a strong ethical framework and not used to manipulate or coerce people, as this could also easily be the outcome of a more explorative version of this design approach.

Product Stewardship

In a traditional linear system, producers of goods are not required to take responsibility of their products or packaging once they have sold the product into the market. Some companies offer limited warranties to guarantee a certain term of service, but many producers avoid being involved in the full life of what they create. This means that there are limited incentives for them to design products with closed-loop end of life options. In a circular economy, producers actively take responsibility for the full life of the things they create starting from the business model through to the design and end of life management of their products.

Product stewardship and extended producer responsibility are two strong initiatives that encourage companies to be more involved in the full life of what they produce in the world. There are several ways that this can occur; in a voluntary scenario, companies work to circularize their business models (such as a PSS model) or governments issue policies that require companies to take back, recapture, recycle or re-manufacture their products at the end of their usable life. For example, the European Union has many product stewardship policies in place to incentivize better product design and full life management such as the Ecodesign directive, WEEE, Product Stewardship and now the circular economy directives.

The key here is that the design of both the products and the business case is created to have full life-cycle responsibility and is managed as an integrated approach to product service delivery so that the product doesn't get lost from the value system. Partnerships between organizations can enable a rapid introduction of product stewardship, such as a bottling company leasing the service of beverage containers to the drinks company. One key element of this is a take-back program, whereby the producing company offers to take back and reconfigure, repair, remanufacture or recycling the products they produced. This incentivizes them to design them to be easily fixed, upgraded or pulled apart for high-value material recycling.

Dematerialization

Reducing the overall size, weight and number of materials incorporated into a design is a simple way of keeping down the environmental impact. As a general rule, more materials result in greater impacts, so it’s important to use fewer types of materials and reduce the overall weight of the ones that you do use without compromising on the quality of the product.

You don’t want to dematerialize to the point where the life of the product is reduced or the value is perceived as being less; you want to find the balance between functional service delivery, longevity, value and optimal material use.

Modularity

Products that can be reconfigured in different ways to adapt to different spaces and uses have an increased ability to function well. Modularity can increase resale value and offer multiple options in one material form. Just like you can build anything with little Lego blocks, modularity as a sustainable design approach implicates the end owner in the design so they can reconfigure the product to fit their changing life needs.

As a design approach for non-physical outcomes, modularity enables creatives to consider how the things they create can be used in different configurations. This is all about making this adaptable to different scenarios and thus increase value over time. It’s important to ensure designs are durable enough to withstand being taken apart and reconfigured, as well as making it easy to do and the style timeless so it increases its duration of use. Modularity should also increase recycling and repairability by offering replacement parts and a service model.

Longevity

Longevity is about creating products that are aesthetically timeless, highly durable and will retain their value over time so people can resell them or pass them on. Products that last longer aren’t replaced as frequently and can be repaired or upgraded during their life as long as their style and functionality have durability as well.

Ensure that the materials you select enable a long life, and be sure to consider multiple use case scenarios such as repair options and resale encouragement.

Disassembly

Design for disassembly requires a product to be designed so that it can be very easily taken apart for recycling at the end of its life. How it is put together, the types of materials that are used and the connection methods all need to be designed to increase the speed and ease of taking it apart for repair, remanufacturing and recycling. Often the case with technology, the norm is to design products that lock the end owner out, discouraging any form of repairability during the use phase while also reducing the likelihood of recapturing the materials at the end of life.

This design strategy is particularly relevant to technology, requiring the design of the sub and primary components to be just as easily disassembled as it is to manufacture them. For maximum recapture, we need to reduce the number of different types of materials, the connection mechanisms, and the ease of extraction. This is a super critical strategy for monitoring technical materials inflow to reduce negative impacts at end of life.

Recyclability

Making a recyclable product goes beyond simply selecting a material that can be so. You have to consider the recyclability of all the materials, the way they are put together and the use case, along with the ease of recycling at end of life. Relying on something being “technically recyclable” as a sustainable design solution to your product is just lazy and often does not result in environmental benefits, as recycling is very much broken. So, you need to ensure that it is being designed to maximize the likelihood that it will be recaptured and recycled in the system it will exist within.

Assembly methods will impact how easily disassembled for recycling products will be. Also, make sure that there are systems in place so that the product can actually be recycled in the location it will end up! For it to be circular, the product has to fit within a closed-loop system, and recycling often is the least beneficial outcome since we lose materials and increase waste through this system.

Connected to disassembly is the ability to easily and cost-effectively recapture the material at end of life. Just making something recyclable does not guarantee that it will be recycled, as it’s often costly and time-consuming. Additionally, many technology items are shredded to get the valuable parts (like gold) instead of getting all the different parts back. What is crucial about this strategy is that it must be used in a system that has the appropriate and functioning recycling market, or a take-back and recapture system must be in place, as well as design features that maximize the behavioral outcomes of the end owners so that the product is actually reacquired and recycled. The Scandinavian bottle recycling system is a perfect example of this. Drink bottles are made of thick and durable materials that can be washed and re-manufactured, and the system is set up with an easy-to-use deposit program and financial incentive to maintain a high level of recapture.

Repairability

Repair is a fundamental aspect of the circular economy. Things wear out, break, get damaged, and need to be designed to allow for easy repair, upgrading, and fixability. Along with the extra parts and instructions on how to do this, we need systems that support, rather than discourage, repair in society. For example, many Apple products are intentionally designed to be difficult to repair, with patented screws and legal implications for opening products up.

Sweden recently opened the world’s first department store dedicated to repair, but any product producer can put mechanisms into place for ease of repair so that the owner has more autonomy over the product and will be encouraged to do so. The Fair Phone is a great example of this.

Reusability

Repair allows the end owner to maintain its value over time, or sell it more easily to then increase its lifespan. But there is also the option of designing so that the product can be reused in a different way from its intended original purpose, without much extra material or energy inputs. An example of this is a condiment jar designed to be used as a water glass.

There are many ways a product can serve a second or even third life after its core original purpose. This approach is useful when you have limited options for designing out disposability.

Re-manufacture

For this strategy, the producer takes into consideration how the parts or entire product can be re-manufactured into new usable goods in a closed-loop system; it’s critical to the technology sector but fits perfectly for many products.

Re-manufacturing is when a product is not completely disassembled and recycled or reused, but instead, some parts are designed to be reused and other parts recycled, depending on what wears out and what maintains its usefulness over time.

Efficiency

During the use phase, many products require constant inputs, such as energy, in the form of charging or water in the form of washing. When a product requires lifetime inputs, it’s called an “active product”, meaning it is constantly tapping into other active systems in order to achieve its function. That’s when design for efficiency comes in, designing to dramatically reduce the input requirements of the product during its use phase.

This will increase the environmental performance and also reduce wear of the product, increasing lifetime use. This approach can also be taken as an overarching one — design to maximize the efficiency of materials, processes, and human labor. As a general rule, “Weight equals impact,” and the more efficient you can be with materials, the lower the overall impact per product unit (this rule has many exceptions, as it is always related to what the alternatives are).

Influence

Things we use influence our lives. This is why social media applications are designed to act like slot machines with continuous scroll, and why airport security lines make you feel like a farm animal. The things we design in turn design us, and thus there is a huge scope for creating products, services, and systems that influence society in more positive ways.

There is still a lot of resistance to sustainability, often because it seems confusing. So, imagine how you can design things that give people an alternative experience to this mainstream perspective. Designing in positive feedback loops to the owner helps change behaviors, just as designing in less options to limit confusion can help direct the more preferable use.

Equity

Accidentally or intentionally, many goods are designed to reinforce stereotypes. Pink toys for girls, dainty watches for women, and chunky glasses for men are a few examples. Reinforcing stereotypes subtly maintains negative and inequitable status quos in society. There are entire labs dedicated to first researching an established trend, and then designing to reinforce it. Design for equity requires the reflection and disruption of the mainstream references that reinforce inequitable access to resources, be it based on gender or outdated stereotypes.

Oppression and inequality exist everywhere, from toilet seat designs to office buildings. Considering the potential impact of your designs on all sorts of humans is critical to creating things that are ethical and equitable. This also applies to the supply chain, ensuring that people along the full chain of materials and manufacturing are valued, paid fairly and respected.

Systems Change

Perhaps the most important of the design strategy tools is the ability to design interventions that actively shift the status quo of an unsustainable or inequitable system. The world is made up of systems, and everything we do will have an impact in some way of the systems around us. So instead of seeing your product as an individual unit, see it as an animated agent in a system, interacting with other agents and thus having impacts.

All systems are dynamic, constantly changing and interconnected. Materials come from nature, and everything we produce will have to return in some way. So, designing from a systems perspective with the objective of intervening will allow for more positively disruptive outcomes to the status quo (see my handbook on the Disruptive Design Method for more on this approach).

Other things to consider

• Where is the energy being sourced? Shift from fossil to renewables.

• What are the hidden impacts embedded within the supply chain? Remove embodied fossil fuel energy.

• How can you recover and put to good use all wasted resources across the supply chain? Look for industrial symbiosis or by-product reuse opportunities.

• How can you design in life extension on your products? Design repair and rescue options as a service for your products.

• Are there ways of partnering to create industrial symbiosis where your product’s by-products are used as raw materials for another process? Reduce waste to landfill by encouraging secondary industries to use industrial by-products.

• How can you design your product to be a service instead? Embrace full product stewardship.

• Do you need to produce a product to deliver the functional need? Look for alternative business models to deliver your customer’s functional desires.

• What is the energy mix in the manufacturing and use phase? The types of energy used will increase or decrease environmental impacts.

• Does a product need to exist or can we deliver value and function in a different format?

The UnSustainable Design Approaches!

There are many insidious techniques used by designers to manipulate and coerce consumers into behaviors and practices that are unsustainable and inequitable. Here are three types you should avoid! There are also many accidental actions that may have good intentions that result in greenwashing, so be careful not to invest more in marketing green credentials than in R&D to ensure your product truly is what you claim it to be.

Design for Obsolescence

Planned obsolescence is one of the critically negative ramifications of the GDP-fueled hyper-consumer economy. This is where things are designed to intentionally break, or the customer is locked out through designs that limit repair or software upgrades that slow down processes. This approach tries to constantly turn a profit by manipulating a usable good so its functionality is restricted or reduced and the customer is forced to constantly purchase new goods. It’s in everything from toothbrushes to technology. The habit has led to massive growth, but at the expense of durability and sustainability. How it is used as a positive strategy is when it is part of a well-designed closed-loop system that enables the product to naturally “die” at the right time so it can be reintegrated into the system it is designed within.

Design for Disposability

Designing for things to break is due to the cultural normalization of disposability as a result of increased use of disposability in the design of everyday goods. From coffee cups to technological items, it is a race to the bottom of our economy, where many reusable things have become hyper-disposable. Single-use items plague our oceans with plastic waste and increase the end cost for small businesses and everyday people, as the more addictive the cycle of disposability is, the more costly it becomes to deliver basic service offerings. I have written extensively about this; read more here.

Dark Patterning

A term coined by designer Harry Brignull, the idea of dark patterns are intentional tricks used by designers to manipulate and lure customers into taking actions they don’t necessarily make the choice to do or may otherwise not agree to. Dark patterning includes often exploiting cognitive weaknesses and biases to get people to do things like purchasing extra items they did not need when checking out online, or creating a sense of urgency to increase purchasing — leveraging single-click buy now for impulse buys, using particular colors to evoke emotions and sharing outright misleading information to increase purchases. This website has many great examples.

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LOOKING FOR MORE?

Much of this content is from my handbook on Circular Systems Design, and over at the UnSchool Online, I have a short course on sustainable design strategies and a more extensive one on sustainable design and production. You may also like to find out about the Disruptive Design Method that I created to support deeper design decisions that works to help solve complex problems. I also created the Design Play Cards which include all the eco-design strategies and fun challenges to solve.

Activating Change for the Circular Economy

By Leyla Acaroglu

ACTIVATING THE CIRCULAR ECONOMY

Every time we purchase something, we are essentially voting for the kinds of things we want in the world. It’s through our purchase preferences, as individuals, as governments and as organizations, that we can encourage or discourage industries, services and products based on what we want to see continue. This is where there is great opportunity for change, as many of the products and services that fill our economy today have huge impacts on the planet, offer up many inequities along the supply chain and are designed to break.

We already have so much of the knowledge on what needs to be done to change this status quo. Scientists in the fields of life cycle assessment, environmental impact assessment, systems dynamics and consequential impact assessment have been knowledge building for years, contributing to the rising shift toward a circular economy movement. A change in the way we design and deliver everything.

Thanks to all this work, we now have a much stronger understanding of the potential negative outcomes of our actions before we even take them, and we can avoid unintended consequences if we approach problem solving through systems and life cycle thinking.

Gaining this foresight allows us to integrate sustainability into design products and across business models, policies and services. What we need right now is the normalization and integration of these approaches into the things that make up our economy. We have an incredible opportunity right now to catalyze this change, and this requires pioneering leadership from governments and CEOs, as well as the creative thinkers who can help shift the status quo.

We can speed up the change by offering up new ideas, incentivizing producers to approach product design differently and encouraging policymakers to change the dominant linear system. We can amplify sustainable design approaches and life cycle assessment in order to help green supply chains and find unique ways of shifting the status quo on hyper-consumerism through the implementation of product service system models.

Small choices, replicated many times, contribute to big impacts. This applies to all of our choices. Our world is made up of individuals operating as a collective whole. Through systems thinking, we understand the macro and the micro, the parts and the wholes. This thinking helps us gain a deeper understanding of our impacts and the power of influence that we all possess.

Many of the ecological impacts, the externalities that we see in the economy, have come about as a result of supply chain relationships — not just the end of life destination where things end up. Yet, much of our investment and activation is around waste management, rather than on designing out waste from the start.

Recently I released a new handbook called Design Systems Change where I lay out the opportunities for activating our own agency to effect positive change. In the past I have written Circular Systems Design and the Disruptive Design Method Handbooks, all designed to support people in the transition to a circular, regenerative and sustainable economy by design. In thinking deeply about these issues for many years, I have come up with a new proposition, one where the interaction of new value propositions is prioritized in the decision making process.

Integrating value into the circular economy From the Design Systems Change Handbook

Designing Change

We should (and can) be designing products, services and systems that embed the avoidance of waste through their design, instead of designing things with no regard for their consequences and then trying to design services to deal with the waste and impacts they’ll cause.

We need to move rapidly to a post disposable society. The circular economy is helping to make this happen, influencing shifts in the finance sector and in the design of products and services we all rely on. Big players in industry and government are pioneering product-system services that will help to move us away from single-use products and systems to closed loop ones.

I hope and predict that within 5 years, the pioneering companies at the forefront of this shift will have transitioned away from single-use products toward more integrated closed-loop systems that maintain and increase value throughout the system and are designed to dramatically reduce the environmental and social burden that disposability results in.

Not only is this good for the planet, but also it makes good business sense. In an increasingly resource-constrained environment, we have to find ways of reducing supply chain costs, and there are many creative ways to do this while benefiting the planet. 

The opportunities are on the horizon — we just need more activated minds willing to pioneer capturing them. In order to support people in pioneering this transition, I developed the Disruptive Design Method as a scaffolding support tool that guides decision makers through the process of understanding a complex problem, exploring the systems dynamics and then building creative interventions to design positive change.

Embracing Change

Think for a moment of all the ways change occurs in our day-to-day lives. We change our addresses, our music tastes, locations, underwear, ideas, partners, schools, nationalities, cars, governments, jobs, clothes, perspectives, money, the subject... and our minds. We change and reinvent ourselves constantly. We change the world around us and ultimately, we change the planet through the things that we choose to do, and perhaps more importantly, the things that we choose not to do. 

Many of these changes are brought about somewhat organically, even unconsciously, with life events and individual circumstances dictating many of the changes that we make. This approach is no longer enough. 

Conscious observers everywhere are noticing that an individualistic approach to change has dangerous consequences. We see the evidence of this culminating in the major issues at the forefront of global conversations: climate change, renewable energy, refugee crises, to name just a few. 

So how do you go about it when you want to intentionally, proactively affect change? How does that differ from our natural evolution… and where do you even begin in a change making practice? 

Change is everywhere - and always has been

In 500 BC, the Greek philosopher Heraclitus proposed that “the only constant in life is change,” that “stability is an illusion,” and, in his opinion, “there is a constant universal flux.” If, as Heraclitus says, change is constant, then it is also chaotic – “an inescapable paradox, yet a beautiful necessity, critical to all life.”  

We are all changing constantly, and the world is changing around, and with, us. The word change means to ‘make’ or to ‘become different,’ no matter if we’re talking about objects, people, or the natural world. Change encompasses all these, although they develop at varying speeds, be it constant, progressive, static, fast or slow.  

Failure Happens… and It’s a Good Thing!  

At the UnSchool, we approach making change as a state of being. We believe that being change-centric is a way of defining an agenda, the objective, and outcome to effect positive social change in and through the things that we do. 

This change-centric approach is a cultivated one, in which you have to work at wanting to make change. It’s not always easy; making change can definitely hurt sometimes and often requires some measure of failure along the way. How would we have evolved as a species, had we not experienced millions of years of failure and accidents? 

Failing hard and fast early on creates better, stronger results later. In saying this, it should also be noted that change is also one of the easiest things to make happen... if you have the right tools and resources, which you will receive when you engage in our classes, programs and content.  

Systems at Play in Change Making 

Everything is interconnected, so if we want to make change, we have to know how to understand those dynamics as a whole system and as parts of a whole system. When we look at the world through a change-centric lens, we first need to figure out if it’s structural or individual – is it personal or social forces that influence change? 

Social practice theory suggests that our agency for change lies in the influencers of social conditions. Anthony Giddens, one of the most prominent modern sociologists, proposed the theory of structuration. This theory explores the duality of structure where we continually make, and remake, ‘normal society’ through our routine actions and practices. 

Giddens suggests that social constructs influence the individual to a degree that choice is empowered by the practice, rather than the individual. Basically, we are influenced by social forces as well as personal choice-making. Behaviors are habits perpetuated through routine, which are either decided on consciously, or are subtly influenced by society at large. 

It boils down to this: in order to make change, one needs to consider the personal, social, and political systems at play and seek to intervene at different points.  

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