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Deininger, Michael; Balslev, Therese

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Much of what surrounds us today has been designed – the furniture we use, the clothes we wear, the systems we interact with, and even most of the food we eat. While design enables considerable progress, it has inevitably also led to the exploitation of resources, overconsumption, pollution, and destruction. Designers play a vital role in shaping the future and must assume responsibility for the impact their work has on the world. Transitioning from a throw-away to a circular consumer culture presents a promising way towards a more sustainable future. However, for this transition to occur, circularity needs to be integrated early into the design process – not only as an afterthought. Therefore, designers need to develop mindsets that allow them to apply circular principles in their everyday practice. When equipped with such knowledge they can better contribute to a more sustainable future by reducing the destructive impact humans have on the planet. Prior work has focused on developing methods and tools that foster circular mindsets in designers. The Circular Strategies Wheel, a framework that has been developed in collaboration with Danish Design Center (DDC), is such a tool. This framework leverages three lifecycle stages of products and materials: 1) The start of life phase, 2) The product life/use phase and 3) The end-of-life phase. However, like many others, this tool requires facilitation and is not easily scaled when targeting designers, creatives, and makers in large communities. Thus, in this study, we investigate different methods to disseminate circular strategies among designers, supporting their work of transitioning towards a more circular practice, and thereby influencing their design approaches in a scalable manner. We hypothesized that self-guided design journals are a viable alternative to facilitated workshops for distributing circular strategies among designers in makerspaces and fab labs. To test this hypothesis, participants in this study were introduced to 18 circular strategies through either a facilitated workshop or a self-guided design journal. After leveraging these strategies in a design project of their own choice, participants were asked to self-assess their knowledge. Analysis of the findings showed no significant differences between the self-guided design journals and the facilitated workshops, suggesting that both methods are similarly motivating and suitable to help foster circular mindsets among designers in makerspaces and fab labs. This insight is encouraging as it suggests fewer resources might be needed to foster mindsets. However, the workshop significantly increased participants’ self-assessed knowledge about circular economy as well as their level of confidence in their own ability to apply circular strategies in their future design practice, suggesting that facilitated learning still offers additional benefits.

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