Learning for innovative design for sustainability

Project: Circular Design Europe
Organisation: European project funded by Erasmus+
Location: Europe
Year: 2016 - 2019
Keywords: Circular economy, eco-design,

WHY? Under the name ‘Circular Design: Learning for Innovative Design for Sustainability’, this initiative wanted to enhance the creation and consumption of sustainable products and services, aligned with European Circular Economy policies.

Design has a key role to play in developing innovative solutions to current challenges – an approach that must consider the needs of end users and integrate sustainability criteria in processes and strategies for creating products and services.

WHAT? Circular Design Europe is a European project funded by Erasmus+ within the social business and the educational innovation field.

The project falls within the innovation, higher education and business area and is aligned with European policies on the circular economy. The goal of these policies is to find common solutions that help minimise the environmental impact of consumption and reduce the use of resources, which will require us to rethink the way our societies work.

During a period of three years starting in November 2016, the ‘Circular Design’ project involved thirteen partners including European universities, design centers and companies coming from four different regions: Catalonia, Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden.

HOW? The goals of the project were achieved through a knowledge co-creation process and the development of training materials in order to teach and train students, faculty and enterprise staff of the design sector in Innovative Design for Sustainability (IDfS) strategies. Moreover, plans included the creation of an international programme to place engineering, design and architecture students in companies and FabLabs.

We collaborated in the project as a company partner. Our role as eco-design professionals, was to generate eco-design resources and teach design students towards circular economy.

We developed an Ecodesign Best Practice guide, in which we analysed ten successful eco-design projects. We interviewed ten european companies: sea2see, zicla, mammuko, novell, transparent speaker, tierra, simon electric, label breed, erfskip and flokk.