Description
The design of product-service systems is a major lever for implementing the circular economy and, thereby, reducing negative environmental impacts, achieving climate targets, resource conservation, and resource sovereignty. The R-strategies serve as a framework to re-design products towards a more circular design. In a project seminar, we applied this framework on everyday products and their surrounding service systems and propse re-design options for computer mice, hair dryers, skis and several other products. Among other things, the durability and recyclability of material combinations as well as modularity and reparability were taken into account. These elaborated examples highlight some of the potentials lying in the design disciplines to support a circular economy. While we highlight various potentials in a solution-orientated fashion, we also discuss limits of the potentials of product design within the current economic system, infrastructures, and behavior patterns. With this approach we use design concepts as boundary objects for an discourse with other disciplines towards a “design for circularity”, which can only be achieved by inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration.
