Staging co-design for a circular economy

Abstract

In recent years major companies such as Philips, H&M and Google have adopted a circular economy agenda to promote sustainability. Design consultancies such as IDEO has developed and promoted a circular design guide to help companies in this endeavour. However, designing for a circular economy often require design and reconfiguration of entire value chains - making the transition towards a circular economy rather difficult. In this paper we analyse a development project from the Danish island of Bornholm to investigate how to align diverse actors across the value chain in a process of co-creating systems for a circular economy. We combine design, value chain considerations and circular economy mindsets to informing negotiations of concerns among actors in the value chain. Such strategical navigation might involve: 1. Staging initial spaces for dialogue with central actors from the value chain and initiates a process of mapping out their concerns 2. Staging a re-alignment space where the diverse actors can meet and interact to discuss and negotiate their concerns and their roles in the network 3. Design and enactment of a number of objects to faciliate negotiations.