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 Products can also be easily made to appear old or outdated by manufacturers as they introduce newer versions of their best sellers.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.

Quick Guide to the Disruptive Design Method

By Leyla Acaroglu, Originally published on Medium

The Disruptive Design Method (DDM) is a systems-based approach to creative problem solving for tackling complex social and environmental issues. It combines sociological inquiry methods (mining) with systems explorations (landscaping) and design and creativity (building) approaches. The method is built on systems, sustainability and design, allowing for a three-dimensional perspective shift of a problem arena to ensure that interventions create positive change. Here we cover a quick guide to the DDM. 

We live in a complex interconnected world riddled with dynamic and often chaotic problems that requires a mindset and skillset shift in order for us to address them at a systemic level. 

The Disruptive Design Method is an approach to problem-solving that helps develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works, and provides a unique way of exploring, identifying, and creating tactical interventions that leverage systems change for positive social and environmental outcomes.

The three-phase process of Mining, Landscaping, and Building (MLB) is cycled through to create outcomes that are creative and sustainability-focused. This approach offers a micro-to-macro-and-back-again perspective of the problem arena in which you wish to create positive change within and supports the development of a more three-dimensional worldview. 

The three phases of the Disruptive Design Method: Mining, Landscaping and Building

In this quick guide, I explain the what, why, and how of the DDM, along with ways it can help create non-conventional approaches to addressing complex problems, such as those presented by the UN Sustainable Development Goals. 

We use systems boundaries to define the spaces we wish to explore, and then find connection points perfect for a tactical intervene (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problems arena). Then, because we have all this new knowledge from mining and landscaping, we can rapidly develop divergent and creative approaches to intervening in the systems the create change.

Any problem from small, hyper-local concerns to massive global issues can be explored and evolved through this method, and because it’s a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on the problem. The core of the approach is always systems, sustainability, and design.

POSITIVELY DISRUPTIVE BY DESIGN 

Design is an incredibly powerful tool that changes the world. Everything around us has been constructed to meet the needs of our advanced human society, and in turn, our individual experiences of the world are influenced dramatically by the designed world we inhabit. 

We are each citizen designers of the future through the actions we take every day, which is why I developed the DDM as a systems-based creative intervention design method for exploring and actively participating in the design of a future that works better for us all. 

Intended as a way for creatives and non-creatives alike to develop the mental tools needed to activate positive change, the DDM approaches creative problem solving by mining through problems and employing a divergent array of research approaches, moving through to landscaping the systems at play and identifying the connections and relationship dynamics that reinforce the elements of the system, and then ideating opportunities for systems interventions that amplify positive impact by building new ideas that shift the status quo of the problem at a systems level. This is then cycled through in an iterative way until the outcome is tangible and effective at altering the state of the issue at hand. 

The DDM is an iterative process

As Buckminster Fuller teaches, often the smallest part of the system has the capacity to make the biggest change — and that’s one of the fundamental approaches that the DDM enables: identify the part within the system that you have agency and ability to impact.

Instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, we teach you how to be problem lovers who dive right into the sticky center of the issue; then, you will get busy designing divergent solutions that build on your unique individual sphere of influence, which is the space we can all curate to affect change on the people or things around us. Your personal sphere of influence will grow and ebb and flow over time.

Additionally, the DDM includes a 12-part knowledge set that, when explored as a whole, equips anyone with the thinking and doing tools to be a more aware and intentional agent for positive change. It also has the tools to cycle through the issues and seek out the non-obvious opportunities, designing divergent interventions and solutions that build on your unique individual sphere of influence. These are topics of self-development explored in my latest handbook Design Systems Change and through my 30-day Challenge. 

Perhaps most importantly though, instead of avoiding or ignoring problems, this method offers up tools for shifting perspectives that enable one to become a problem lover with the ability to dive right under the obvious parts of the issue at hand, avoid laying blame, and instead, identify and uncover the parts of the system that reinforce the issue so that change can be created. 

In a world where many people see and feel problematic impacts with intensity — the social, environmental, and political issues especially — and then become overwhelmed or disabled by this complexity, we see good-intentioned people disengage from taking action. Thus, I can not understate how powerful seeing problems through the lens of opportunity, optimism, and yes, even a bit of love can be for someone. I want to provide an agentizing effect, a set of tools that enable people to move from overwhelming problems to possible actions; after all, the world is made up of the accumulation of individual actions of many, you and me included.

Problem loving is the DDM mindset

THE ORIGINS OF THE DDM

When I first started to develop the Disruptive Design Method, it was in part a reaction to the one-dimensional problem-solving techniques that I had been taught through my years of traditional education. Back in 2014, as I was finishing my PhD and preparing to launch the UnSchool of Disruptive Design, I knew that there needed to be a scaffolding that would support all the content I wanted to fill this experimental knowledge lab with. Drawing on the years of professional experience and research I had to date, I went about iteratively developing and refining the modules from 20+ down to 12 core components of the Disruptive Design Methodology set, a learning system that, once fully engaged with, fits together to create the DDM.

The 12 core modules of the Disruptive Design Methodology

It’s a ‘scaffolding’ because it’s not intended to be rigid and formulaic, but instead, it offers the support that one needs as they start to develop a more three-dimensional view of the world and adopt the skills of systems thinking, problem exploration, and creative intervention design. I personally use this approach in all the commissions and collaborations I do, like in designing learning systems for Finland and Thailand, and in creating sustainable living initiatives, like the Anatomy of Action with the UNEP.

A scaffolding is often used to create support around a building as it is going up — it’s the skeleton structure that enables the progression up into the air. This is the intention with the DDM, to offer support as a 3D worldview and mindset is developed to overcome reductive thinking and create a more robust set of tools that enable a problem-loving approach to solving complex real-world problems. 

I, along with my team, have taught the DDM and the core approaches of systems and life cycle thinking to thousands of people all over the world, from teenagers to CEOs, with hundreds of alumni completing our in-person programs and thousands enrolled in our online school. We have seen many different incarnations of the DDM and its tools in action throughout our five years of running the UnSchool and its various programs. 

The world needs more pioneers of positively disruptive change — people equipped with the thinking and doing skills that will enable them to understand and love complex systems and then be able to translate that into actual change. There are, of course, many tools and approaches for designing change, and the DDM is just one of a wide suite of tools out there. I am an appreciator of many of them, but for me, the reason why anyone should gain an overview of this approach is that it combines the three pillars of systems, sustainability, and design, of which I have not seen an approach yet to do the same. 

What this all boils down to is having a unique method on hand to positively intervene and disrupt the status quo of any problem arena to ensure that the outcome is more effective, equitable, circular and sustainable. That’s why we always offer equity access scholarships and ensure that people from all walks of life can gain access to these valuable perspective-shifting tools we offer at the UnSchool.

THE 3-PARTS OF DISRUPTIVE DESIGN METHOD

There are three distinct parts of the Disruptive Design Method — Mining, Landscaping, and Building (MLB) — each is enacted and cycled through in order to gain a granulated, refined outcome through iterative feedback loops.

The first part is Mining, where the mindset is one of curiosity and exploration. In this phase, we do deep participatory research, suspend the need to solve, avoid trying to impose order, and embrace the chaos of any complex system we are seeking to understand. The tools of this phase are: research, observation, exploration, curiosity, wonderment, participatory action, questioning, data collection, and insights. This can be described as diving under the iceberg and observing the divergent parts that enable us to understand a problem arena in more detail.

The second stage is Landscaping. This is where we take all the parts that we uncovered during the Mining phase and start to piece them together to form a landscaped view through systems mapping and exploration. Landscaping is the mindset of connection, where you see the world as a giant jigsaw puzzle that you are putting back together and creating a different perspective that enables a bird’s eye view of the problem arena. Insights are gathered, and locations of where to intervene in the system to leverage change are identified. The tools for this phase are: systems mapping (cluster, interconnected circles, etc.), dynamic systems exploration, synthesis, emergence, identification, insight gathering, and intervention identification.

The third part of is Building. This is the creative ideation phase that allows for the development of divergent design ideas that build on potential intervention points to leverage change within the system. The goal is not to solve but to evolve the problem arena you are working within so that the status quo is shifted. Here we use a diversity of ideation and prototyping tools to move through a design process to get to the best-fit outcome for your intervention.

The key to this entire approach is iteration and ‘cycling through’ the stages to get to a refined and ‘best-fit’ outcome. Why do we do this? Because problems are complex, knowledge builds over time, and experience gives us the tools to make change that sticks and grows. This cycling through approach draws upon the Action Research Cycle to create an iterative approach to exploring, understanding, and evolving the problem arena.

The three applied parts of the MLB Method are based on a more complex Methodology set. This set combines 12 divergent theory arenas to form the foundation of identifying, solving, and evolving complex problems, as well as helps develop a three-dimensional perspective of the way the world works. From cognitive sciences to gamification and systems interventions, the 12 units of the Disruptive Design Methodology are designed to fit together to form the foundations of a practice in creative change-making.

THE FOUNDATIONS: SYSTEMS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND DESIGN

The UnSchool is deeply rooted in a foundation of applied systems, sustainability, and design, forming three knowledge pillars that hold up all we do — including leveraging the Disruptive Design Method. 

The three pillars of the UnSchool and DDM

Whenever we teach a program, we always begin with systems thinking as the foundation, as it is one of the most powerful tools that we can use to address complex problems. It enables any practitioner to see how everything is interconnected, and systems can be viewed from multiple perspectives, allowing a shift from rigid to flexible mindsets. We also engage with the principles of sustainability through each phase, which for us, means doing more with less, understanding how the planet works so that we can work within its means, and evolving from an extraction-based society to a circular and regenerative one. 

Through the Mining phase, systems boundaries are used to define the problem arenas that one wants to explore. Through systems mapping, research techniques, observation and reflection, all the parts that make up a system and their connections are explored through the landscaping phase, laying the groundwork for exposing unique places to intervene (which is often not where you would intuitively think, based on your starting knowledge in the problem arena).

From this, new knowledge is built from the Mining and Landscaping phases, which forms the foundation for the Building phase — rapidly designing divergent and creative ideas to intervening in the problem arena. Any problem from small, hyper-local concerns to massive global issues can be explored and evolved through this MLB Method. And, because it’s equally a thinking and doing practice, it can be adapted and evolved based on any problem. The core of the approach is always systems, sustainability, and design. 

HOW THE DISRUPTIVE DESIGN METHOD HELPS MAKE POSITIVE CHANGE

LOVING THE PROBLEM

Many people avoid problems, which means that they never truly understand them. By learning to love problems and see them as opportunities in disguise, you will develop an open mind that thinks differently. This is all about being curious and trying to understand something before you attempt to solve it! The more curiosity you can foster, the more things you will uncover about the world around you.

SEEING RELATIONSHIPS

Everything is interconnected, and actions create reactions. Being able to see the relationships that make up cause and effect are part of any good problem solvers tool belt. The content of the DDM is designed to foster systems perspectives as well as deep identification with cause and effect relationships.

PERSPECTIVE SHIFTING

The ability to see the world through other people’s eyes is critical to building resilience, empathy, and leadership skills. You will uncover how to constantly reflect and explore the world from diverse perspectives, overcome biases and be able to put yourself in the shoes of others to understand why people think or behave differently to you based on their own life and learning experiences.

COLLABORATION

Respectfully and successfully working with others, despite differences, is critical to creativity and leadership skills. The goal is to encourage people to see that diversity in collaboration is just as important as agreement, and that coming to a consensus can be achieved in many different ways. Many of the tools we teach, such as systems mapping, can be used as brilliant collaboration tools, so you gain incredible opportunities to foster effective collaboration.

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At the UnSchool, we approach making change as a state of being; we believe that being change-centric is a way of defining a life agenda, finding purpose, and setting the tone for how you live and contribute through your life and work. We all have the power to affect positive social and environmental change in and through everything we do, from the things we buy to the conversations we have and the kind of work we do. This change-centric approach is by all means a cultivated one in which you have to work at wanting to make change. Because truly, it’s not always easy; in fact, trying to make change can definitely hurt sometimes — and frankly, it 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? Allowing the space for failing early on creates better, stronger results later. In saying this, it should also be noted that change is one of the easiest things to make happen… if you have the right tools and resources, which are built into the DDM.

You can take the full program at your own pace via our online school here, or if you do a certification track, you get access to the full 12 modules, plus loads of extra content on activating and facilitating change. 

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.

Design — It’s not what you think it is | Design Systems Change Handbook Preview

In case you missed it in last week’s journal article, we are gearing up for the exciting launch of a new handbook by Leyla that will be released on March 16, 2020, called Design Systems Change! This is the fifth in her series of handbooks she’s written about making change, with other series titles being: Make Change: A Handbook for Creative Rebels and Change Agents, Tips & Tricks to Facilitating Change, Disruptive Design: A Method for Activating Positive Social Change by Design, Circular Systems Design: A Toolkit for the Circular Economy, and now the fifth one in the series, Design Systems Change: How to activate your career as a creative changemaker and help design a regenerative, circular future.

This newest handbook, Design Systems Change, includes an in-depth exploration of agency-building tools for activating a life and career of creative changemaking. Packed with new insights and ideas on how to expand your sphere of influence and contribute to the transition to a circular, regenerative future, by design, this handbook is also a workbook, complete with over 30 interactive reflections and actions to help expand your capacity to make positive change. 

Leading up to its launch on March 16th, we are sharing excerpts from the handbook from each of the three main sections Design, Systems and Change. This week, we take a peek at the power of design in creating a circular, regenerative future and dive into what design is not. If you want to be one of the first to read the full 190+ pages, then you can preorder it here, and it will be sent to your inbox in a digital format as soon as it's launched! 

Expert from Design Systems Change, By Leyla Acaroglu

Design — It’s not what you think it is

Design is one of the most powerful and pervasive influencers of our lives. It is everywhere, from the bureaucratic processes that drive us all mad (often ad hoc and reductive design), through to the beautiful user experience of our treasured devices (often addictive and intentionally designed to steal your eyeballs away from other things). 

There are the pain-in-the-ass-designs, like call centers that are intentionally designed to make you hang up before you can voice your complaint, stores that usher you past expensive items in your search for the basics like bread so you buy more, or my personal pet peeve: the airport security line that requires all humans to momentarily become a cow as they are herded through a maze of control. Cities, buildings, products, services, bus routes, election processes — everything that we humans created has been designed by someone or a group of people. 

As a powerful social scriptor, design gives narrative; how you move around a city or the rules you obey or disregard, for instance, design influences your mind to create actions and form opinions. Our mind is activated in conscious and covert ways by visual signs and physical forms, wayfinding devices, restrictions, symbols and aesthetics. 

From the moment we are born, to the day we depart this Earth, our lives are profoundly influenced by the designed world. And, despite the hugely influential far-reaching impact of design as a profession and a socially forming process, for some reason, as a society, we seem to succumb to reducing design down to the basics of aesthetics and function, rather than what it is really doing — influencing and forming the entire world as we know it. 

Perhaps it’s through this mystique that it helps to perpetuate the systems of unsustainability that design enables in our extraction-based economy? 

One of the things I think about a lot is the relationship between design and the social structures that also influence us all immensely. After all, we are social animals, and humans attribute their success to collaboration and the social connections we form. 

Sure, we are riddled with biases and are as equally un-cooperative as we are collaborative, but we also look after our young intensely and form strong social bonds and smile when others smile at us, we work towards effectively getting along. We speak shared languages and operate under social expectations that condition us to behave in socially-beneficial ways and to value things in culturally appropriate ways. Objects and symbols are central to the forming of our cultures and interpreting the physical world we inhabit. 

Designers in all their types and roles – industrial designers, fashion designers, furniture designers, architects, landscape architects, interior designers, user experience designers, service designers, graphic designers, even engineers – all work to create the services, products and processes that the world engages with. Why? Because people have needs that are met through the creation of things. Designers are thus charged with the task of converting these needs into things that meet them and doing it in unique and novel ways that beat the competition. Designers are value creates. 

This system has incentivized many to come up with the desires before the products can fill them, but that’s an entirely different story to tell. Individually, we might want to stay connected to friends and colleagues so technology helps us do that, but collectively, we need to have a system of governance that keeps society in some sort of stable place. So, we iteratively design governments and legal systems with penalties for misbehavior.

Design thus operates on many levels to combine competing aspects, such as function, aesthetics, enjoyment, desirability, entertainment and control. The latter can be seen in many of the design decisions around shared communal artifacts, like street side seats or public buildings; there are often many aspects incorporated to deter certain types of people and engage others. The park bench is perfect for the office worker to sit for 30 minutes and each their lunch, but intentionally designed so that the homeless person can’t sleep on it or the skateboarding kid can’t grind her board against it. 

Design may be the output of imagination and creativity, but it forms the structures that create our societies as we know them.

The one unifying factor of design is that the driving force behind it is to create something that meets a defined or intended “need”. We define this as functionality, and everything that exists can be defined by its core function. If a product or service does not fulfill a clear functionality, then it doesn’t function, and it’s often seen as lacking value or being purely aesthetic. 

A chair with two legs that does not stand up is broken, a car without a drive shaft may look like a car but is unable to achieve the act of driving, a blunt knife or a bucket with a hole, a hat with no rim, a building without a front door — these are all pointless things as they don’t serve the core function that is needed for us to ascribe value and thus use them, desire them and keep them in our lives. Or more importantly, we may not part with money to own them. A government without a way of collecting money from its citizens may find that it is quickly unable to afford to pay for the services it intended to offer in exchange for votes, thus it is unable to function in terms of being elected or seen as governing. 

All designs can have unintended consequences, such as creating perverse incentives, spillover effects or externalities. These are often not conceived at the point of creation and are thus dealt with after the thing has come into existence and the feedbacks of interacting with the world can be seen.  

Design is therefore an all-encompassing human capacity that reaches beyond the known professions of industrial, fashion, graphic, user experience and interior design. There are also policy writers, researchers, scientists and administrative professionals who likewise employ design as a tool for enacting change. Absolutely everything that humans have conjured into being is, in some way. a designed artifact and thus, should be seen as a product of our constructed world. But perhaps the most important, unspoken thing about design is the fact that whatever we can make, we can redesign, which further opens up the opportunity for the idea us all being everyday citizen designers of the future. 

The way we each make choices, move through our cities, select food, and act on our consumption preferences all create a type of design outcome, as every action has impacts. 

By understanding the power of design, both as a profession and as an outcome of the choices we make in our daily lives, then we can gain the tools to redesign systems and unlock some of design’s potential to be an effective tool for enacting positive change. 

Many designers are none the wiser to the impact that they have; with short timelines and demanding briefs, it’s difficult to find the time to adequately assess the impact of any one or combined design choices they make. But this has to change. We need to foster within the design community a collective code of conduct, a set of standards and ethical guidelines to ensure that what we create is not just serving a system of exploitation and extraction, but instead creating greater value than is being taken. This is what circular systems design is all about!*

Thus, if we are to design the world that works better for all of us, then our perception of design, what it does to us overtly and covertly — that reductive idea has to change. Instead of it being a fruitless contributor to the world of luxury, business and entertainment, we can leverage design to be the incredibly powerful social influencer that it is by default, as it can make or break elections, control societies, create change and dictate the future. 

Contrary to all the design thinking rhetoric out there, ask any designer how they do what they do, and they will each give you a very different set of tools, processes and design practices that they use to get from a set brief to a solid outcome. Design thinking is one approach put forth by one set of designers who do a particular type of design work. There is nothing wrong with design thinking; it’s just that it’s not the defining process of design. There is no standardized design process, as design is an experiential act that requires many different tools. For example, an architect uses very different processes than a fashion designer or a UX designer. 

Design thinking can be done well and certainly serves a purpose, but it’s not the only type of design approach and should be like everything else: questioned for its integrity and viability to solve the more complex problems we collectively face. 

We can’t solve complex problems with simple solutions that don’t address the root cause of the issues within the system. We need depth of understanding and to embrace complexity. This is why applying systems thinking to any creative process is critical to coming up with solutions that fit within the complexity, rather than trying to design it away.

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Next week, we will share an excerpt from the Systems section, so stay tuned!