Design-led waste management: enhancing stakeholders information exchange for circular productions

To enable sustainable future production systems, waste management is a crucial issue, and designers may assume the role of leadership by negotiating proper material use among various stakeholders that allows resources to be reintegrated into life cycles and establishing new production hierarchies that prioritize waste prevention and capitalize on market opportunities. The presented research investigates ways of stimulating circular material use in the furniture industry, where a transformation has already started, in part due to economic interests and shifting consumer sensibility, but mostly due to a regulatory push towards more sustainable solutions, especially in case of public procurements. While designers have long been experimenting with recycled materials and their distinct visual identity, it is still challenging for them to find locally available circular material options and comprehend their real environmental impact. Due to this difficulty, sustainable and circular design typically requires specialised experts, as well as more time and resources. To mitigate this issue and allow designers to be not only creative leaders, but also agents of sustainable material choices since the initial product conception, this project examines the possibilities of using advanced digital tools for facilitating the design process and, in particular, information flows between three key stakeholders: designers, furniture manufacturers, and waste managers (secondary raw materials). Interviews with these stakeholder categories led to identifying insights organised in three main problematic areas about circular materials: limited awarenessand mistaken perceptions; lack of trust in the environmental impact data; difficulty of choice and supply chain setup. Subsequently, based on the identified requirements, a twofold system of digital tools was designed, comprising an online platform for collecting and exploring circular materials, and a CAD software plugin for channelling circular materials into the design process, allowing designers to quickly confront estimates of environmental impact of different material combinations. AI-driven features have been designed into various workflows, from material uploading to search, recommendations and comparisons in natural language. The developed knowledge and experiments will contribute to a more effective digital toolbox for designers, allowing them to become leaders of circular transformation and proactive professionals who not only do the right design choices, but also help to establish local and circular supply chains.