Designing for the squared circle
If a thing wasn't made by nature, someone or something has designed it. Perhaps that misses out the greatest Designer of them all...
There are some among us who have a sneaking suspicion that there may still be some kind of place for the Quadrivium in Western education. Given its fascination with the beauty of numbers, geometry and music, and their reflections in nature and the cosmos – rather than today’s focus on regurgitating facts and, some may argue, a relentless pursuit of qualifications over competence – the Quadrivium advocates may have a point.
For the Ancients who devised the Quadrivium, the circle and its romances with the hexagon, pentagon and especially the square hold a particular magic. We may never know how and who managed to figure out that the Earth and Moon together square a circle – a square drawn round the Earth has the same perimeter as a circle drawn through the centre of the Moon sitting atop it. But it’s a fair bet that he or she (there was no ‘they’ in those days) was a genius a few orders above many of us living today. Perhaps even higher than those bright stars in the trading firmament who still manage to profit from portfolios with increasing numbers of zombie stocks.
Another genius of the first water was, of course, Leonardo. His Vitruvian Man shows how a man's proportions fit within both the square and the circle, and point towards that divine proportion valued by designers, the Golden Ratio.
Images: TGE / NASA / OpenClipart
Leonardo was the archetypal designer and undoubtedly a man of his time, the quintessential Renaissance polymath. Art, anatomy, science, invention and engineering, mathematics, music, literature and writing: we can only speculate how he might have applied his gifts to the systems thinking problems we talk about so much today in relation to the restoration of a sustainable world.
Circular Design, we feel, would have been right up Leonardo’s street. And, since we started looking at some of the folks who are doing it today – we posted on one such company last week – we’ve been surprised to see how many times Circular Design has crossed our field of view.
The Design Council is, of course, well on top of it, making Design for Planet its mission and telling us:
We need to accelerate the speed with which we make design part of the solution, acknowledging that it has been a big part of the problem.
Source: Design Council.
Likewise the Ellen MacArthur Institute, which asserts design is fundamental to a circular economy and the next big thing in design is circular.
Right, we understand the need. But how does Circular Design work and what skills do designers need to be able to do it? Well, the VTT institute in Finland is doing a lot in the Circular Economy space and published a state of the art review of technical circular design in 2021, which included RSA’s 2016 Four Design Models for Circular Economy:
Source: RSA Great Recovery
We could perhaps add some of the 7R’s of sustainability, like Design for Repair, Design for Repurpose – car batteries for other end-of-car-life uses, perhaps? – and even, in the case of packaging, Design for Rot.
But there’s one thing nagging us here and it’s in the sacred inner circle of Design for Longevity. Certainly, making things to last has to be a good thing, doesn’t it, and we could point to a small number of products like Levi 501’s that have durability and that certain timeless quality. But how many times have we heard it said, ‘they just don’t build them like that anymore’, or, ‘ah, they used to build them to last in those days’. Consumer electronics is a great example of planned obsolescence and lots of waste, and it also illustrates another important need for product longevity: enduring aesthetics. From news services to fashion to cars, the continual focus on the new rather than the significant often calls for rapid turnovers in visuals that have become endemic and call for major mindshifts to reduce demand. It has to be said that the Apples, Googles and Amazons of this world really don’t help in this regard, either.
Perhaps this is one of the key challenges for circular design, to redefine the modern concept of everything having to be new in order to be acceptable and focusing on designs that will persist: like the Ray-Ban Wayfarer of the 1950s, the Porsche 911 from the sixties, the Louis Vuitton Speedy bag from 1930, or Leo Fender’s classic Telecaster (1950) and Stratocaster (1954) guitars.
Image: Guitar World
So, what about the competences a designer might need for Circular Design? The Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) has done some fine work there and its 2021 paper, which claims to be ‘one of the first studies to provide empirical evidence for the need for [Circular Design] competences’ comes up with the following wheel:
Image: TU Delft
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation certainly likes what TU Delft is doing and also signposts one or two more that have specific focuses on circular design. Linköping University in Sweden (circular economy and eco-design) for example and, here in the UK, Brunel (design for the circular economy) and University of Arts London (UAL). When we look further at UAL we find it has its own Centre for Circular Design, which among other things is researching into the roles of design in changing social models and changing mindsets. All part of the design for longevity challenge we were thinking about earlier.
But, here’s a question we found ourselves asking as we browsed through the growing mound of resources on the subject: is circular design the same thing as design for sustainability? Thinking more, the one is part of t’other, isn’t it? While circular design builds products and systems that operate within a circular economy, keeping materials and resources in use for as long as possible, design for sustainability encompasses circular design principles but adds the other pillars of sustainability in creating designs that contribute positively to social and economic well-being, as well as the planet and all its inhabitants.
Brunel University recognises this and a 2021 presentation from its Design for Sustainability research group lists design for sustainable behaviour, design for social innovation and design for the base of the pyramid amongst its research themes. These are all interesting areas and, one could argue, are essential for the restoration of a sustainable planet. Design for sustainable behaviour includes anything from nudging – like retail designs that place healthier or eco-friendly products at eye level – to furoshiki wraps; design for social innovation might encourage community designs for social challenges like safe streets and urban farming; while design for the base of the pyramid can covers a wide range of products and services, like the fabulous (we have one) wonderbag from South Africa.
And, of course, designs needs to make economic sense to be sustainable in today’s money-driven world. It’s almost a cliché to mention the DeLorean DMC-12 here, but we will anyway.
However we might define it, there are many designers to educate in order to square the sustainability circle. According to the Design Council:
The design economy is a major employer. In 2020 there were 1.97 million people working in the design economy – or one in 20 workers in the UK. Of these, 1.62 million were designers.
Source: Design Council, 2022
And designers are everywhere. Architecture; industry and engineering; fashion, footwear and fabrics; gaming, media and IT; make-up and hair; marketing and advertising; interiors and furniture; sound; pyrotechnics; landscapes; even puppets, to pull out but a few design disciplines from the ESCO database. The Design Council even tells us that more than three-quarters of all designers now work in non-design sectors such as finance, retail, and construction: these might be the sectors that need circular design most of all.
Perhaps a good start might be for someone to lay out the common threads of education for circular design and design for sustainability that apply across the main disciplines at least. Perhaps somebody already has. Please let us know if that’s the case.