Evelyne Roth

Circular design processes

Fall Semester 2021

Circular Economy – means radically re-thinking and re-shaping design processes from the initial stages of material sourcing and on to manufacturing and assembly, distribution, sales, usage, repair, reuse, recovering and reprocessing. It is a re-thinking process, which has to transform thinking into doing, i.e., re-making.

Whereas material know-how is treated as one of the forward-thinking issues in Circular Economy and can already be employed today through concrete circular products in material cycles, what role the act of design (Entwurf) and aesthetic sensations play in design processes is unclear.

"Never generate more waste" means that at the end of an object's lifecycle the resources that had been employed in its creation can be repurposed to be reintroduced into the cycle. This requires that every single element of an object must be developed in such a way that it serves the cause of continued life (Second Life, Third Life) in a new cycle.

Our current aesthetics for objects in the fields of fashion, interiors, architecture, and product design is mainly characterized by the design language for products that are discarded after use or at best recycled or passed on second-hand. Whoever faces reality in design today and works sustainably has to be focused from the filament to the act of the design of the material and form as well as on recapturing and returning substance to the lifecycle. The fact that in the future we will not only co-design the end of a product's lifecycle, but also its recovery and reintroduction into the economic cycle is something new in our disciplines and raises the following research questions: What skills will designers need in the future in order to be able to design circular products? And how will the aesthetics of the objects, of the things that surround us, change.