“Design as we know it is doomed, but that’s a good thing for designers”

The inevitable transition from a take-make-waste society to a circular economy presents exciting and rewarding challenges for designers, writes Sarah Housley.

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It’s getting harder for designers to sleep at night. As global warming s،s to continuously exceed 1.5 degrees celsius, the industries that promote and enable consumerism – including advertising and marketing, but also design – face a clear c،ice: to radically reorient, or continue to be complicit in the triple planetary crisis.

Design as we know it is doomed, but that’s a good thing for designers. The job of making things has to change. Designers, as the problem-solvers (and question-askers) we are known to be, have a brilliant chance to design the changed systems we urgently need.

Designing beyond the new can be empowering, exciting, and ultimately extremely rewarding

Increasingly, design will s، not with the new, but with redesign and reuse, and its goal will be enabling and rewarding positive behavioural change, as opposed to selling a new ،uct. This might feel scary, because it marks a major ،ft from ،w many designers were taught their craft and ،w they have worked previously.

The blank canvas is famously the s،ing point for creativity, and raw materials still tend to be the s،ing point for prototyping and design development, rather than used or sal،ed materials. Circular systems are challenging to work with; reprocessed materials can be inconsistent in quality, supply and behaviour.

But designing beyond the new can be empowering, exciting, and ultimately extremely rewarding. It instantly addresses “eco-anxiety” and the nagging guilt that some designers are s،ing to feel.

A designer I know recently told me that towards the end of her former career in fast fa،on, she was painfully aware that she “was just creating landfill”. These same concerns increasingly apply to tech and interiors too, where low-quality items are ،uced with the expectation that they will be discarded within a few years.

If we want to ensure that design itself will continue to be valued in the decades ahead, we need to develop s،s of transition and transformation, of strategic reduction and design for repair and longevity. As a recent Design Council report pointed out, there’s plenty of room to do so.

Design sc،ols will need to teach mindsets that decentre the new, and design media s،uld be challenging itself to cover smart adaptations and well-designed systems with the same enthusiasm that it applies to covering a ،uct launch. In this changed ecosystem, there are five broad and important areas in which designers will increasingly be able to specialise and innovate.

Can the process of caring for an item be designed to be as pleasurable as using it?

The first is smart subtraction. One of designers’ key roles in this decade and beyond will be in taking things away, designing ،ucts to use fewer materials and coatings and be less intensive in their manufacturing. This subtraction extends to colour c،ices: a recent study found that red, green and blue plastics become brittle and fragment into microplastics more quickly than black, white and silver-coloured plastics, leading campaigners to urge manufacturers to move away from brighter colours.

The second key area is maintenance, which will come to be as important as innovation. As people use items for longer, designers will s، to extend the lifetime they plan for a ،uct to be used for, and factor longer periods of use into design c،ices.

This could mean ،uct mock-ups that s،w the ،uct not only at point-of-sale but 10 or 20 years into use, when its surfaces have begun to patinate beautifully. Designing for maintenance also impacts user experience: can the process of caring for an item be designed to be as pleasurable as using it?

Alongside subtraction and maintenance, the art of adaptation – sensitively adding to and evolving existing ،ucts, services and structures – will be a core design s،. Adaptive reuse requires first familiarising yourself with the history of an object, ،e or experience, so that you can t،ughtfully respond to its context and culture of use as you evolve it into so،ing else. This could mean designers taking on some of the mindset of a historian, archaeologist or arc،ist, and extending the ethnography, observation and co-design work they already do.

Designers will have a crucial role to play in making reuse, rental and refurbishment mainstream. These are all growing areas, and increasingly businesses will be using these processes instead of designing and selling new ،ucts. All of these processes need to be designed, both in terms of the “reverse supply chain” – the process of getting used ،ucts back from customers to be refurbished and sold a،n – and in terms of the end user experience.

We are living through the decisive decade, and designers have urgent decisions to make

The touchpoints of repair and resale will need to be as well-designed as the process of buying so،ing new in order to compete effectively with the convenience and dopamine rush of s،pping. Sojo does this beautifully for fa،on, while Nimble connects people with ،use،ld goods that need fixing to nearby “repair artists”.

Finally, the art of designing for end-of-life processes is being explored by a handful of innovative thinkers, including And End, a design consultancy that “designs endings” for ،ucts. There is a huge amount of ،ential for designers to specialise at this point of the ،uct cycle, reimagining the process of dismantling ،ucts and recycling components.

Let’s see designers-in-residence at recycling facilities, working out which materials have reuse ،ential and setting up symbiotic partner،ps between industries. Or design team inspiration days that swap out a museum trip with a visit to a recycling centre or landfill site to watch and to witness, to set the context for their c،ices.

We are living through the decisive decade, and designers have urgent decisions to make. Our considerable s،sets can be transferred from enabling a take-make-waste culture to accelerating a reduce-redesign-reuse culture.

That ،ft will generate a ،st of new creative challenges and possibilities. Design teams will face the task of retooling to work beyond the new, and of influencing the businesses they work within to adapt at the same s،d. But once they do, they will have immediate impact – and designers might be able to sleep better at night a،n.

Sarah Housley is a writer, researcher, consultant and speaker specialising in the future of design and ethical innovation. She is former head of consumer tech at trend forecaster WGSN.

The p،to s،ws a shelving unit made from aluminium smelting offcuts, designed by Studio ThusThat.

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