A circular transition requires changes in user behaviours. But acting in a circular way is challenging; it can be more cumbersome, more time-consuming, and sometimes more expensive compared to the linear alternatives. We can help you design offers that both enable circular use patterns and make them preferable!

Today, many people lack preconditions to change their personal life and work life to meet society's sustainability goals and align to strategies for a circular economy. Without changed conditions, it will be difficult for the majority to stop buying newly produced goods and instead start buying, renting, or borrowing things in circular flows and re-circulate them when the time comes. By better understanding users' everyday lives, their circularity-related behaviours, as well as their needs and experience of today's products and services, you will be able to create new circular offerings that enable a circular personal life and work life for more people. Circular offerings based on customer needs also have the potential to both become more attractive than today's linear offerings and contribute to reduced environmental impact. Through this service, RISE helps you explore opportunities for circular offerings with user needs and behaviours in focus.

The service is suitable for companies and organizations that currently develop, renovate, or resell products that can provide clear economic and sustainability benefits if they are circulated in tight loops. Perhaps you offer a product that has a long lifespan without getting paid for the value the product creates over time? Or perhaps you offer a product with a short lifespan that could be redesigned to last longer and be used by more people? Regardless, we can help you explore opportunities for new attractive offers that facilitate circular use patterns.

The service is adaptable to your situation. At a first meeting, we talk about your needs, existing customer offerings and challenges. RISE then proposes appropriate activities, which may include, for example:

• Inspiring lectures on the topic of user-centered circular design.
• Workshops to create an understanding of the customer's situation and/or develop design concepts.
• Design sprint where we work through a business opportunity from needs analysis to design solution and business case.
• User studies that build deeper understanding of the users' situation before workshops or design sprints.

During the activities, RISE introduces concrete and inspiring methods and tools that help you design for circular use patterns with your customers' needs in focus. These help you map processes and customer journeys, explore how users experience circular consumption and reusing products, create concepts based on circular design strategies, and evaluate circular business opportunities.

You will gain a basic understanding of user-centered circular design and how knowledge of the user's personal life or work life can help you develop successful solutions for a circular economy. You will also gain knowledge about how you can work to develop new user-centered circular solutions and what design tools you can use in your process. Depending on the activities carried out, the delivery may also include:

• Insights about user experiences and user needs.
• Ideas and concepts for user-centered circular solutions.
• Business cases for your circular offerings.

Insights and other results can also be compiled by RISE by agreement, for example in a presentation, report or summarised in inspirational scenarios and design fictions or similar. 

The need for preparation varies depending on the activities; we jointly agree on how you can best prepare.

Are you thinking about disseminating information or creating content for an education?
Do not hesitate to contact us at RISE Design for all.

Contact us: studion@ri.se

Please take a look at what we have done in the past
Media production on Vimeo

Accessibility means that all users, with or without disabilities, should be able to access and easily use what you are developing. Without thoughtful design choices, there is a risk of inadvertently excluding people from being able to use a product or service. We help you create accessible design for an inclusive and socially sustainable society. 

Using the variation of different people's abilities as a starting point, accessibility helps to include as many users as possible. There are currently EU requirements stating that public authorities' websites, apps and documents must be accessible. Additionally, by 2025 all EU countries must also have legislated that certain products and services within the private sector must be accessible. Through accessibility, competitive products and services are created that are easy to use for all user groups. 

We continuously work to create accessible physical and digital environments, products and services. An essential aspect of the work is to include the needs of the user. We do this, among other ways, through interviews, user tests, expert evaluations and workshops, some of which we conduct in the high-tech UX lab. Our methods are well-tested and developed to create a deep understanding of users and their needs. 

We also follow principles for universal design to create environments, products and services that as many people as possible can access and use. Furthermore, we adhere to standards, such as the European standard for digital accessibility, EN 301 549, the Swedish DOS law and WCAG 2.1 which describe guidelines for creating accessible digital products. We base our expert evaluations on these. 

What we do:

• Evaluation of websites, apps, web content, pdfs and documents in accordance with legal requirements and standards 
• Evaluations through the involvement of the target group, user testing and expert evaluations 
• Provide advice and support in design processes, including requirement specification and needs analysis 
• Create design proposals 
• Education in accessibility 

Based on our conclusions from reviews, evaluations and analysis, we can deliver a summary to you, with recommendations on how your particular product can be improved and fulfill any legal requirements. This can be a valuable contribution to your future design decisions and further product development. 

High-quality video recordings of user tests in our UX lab coupled with clear summaries can also be delivered. This can provide additional valuable understanding and insight for further development, communication and presentation of your product or service. 

According to agreement

EN 301 549 - Accessibility requirements for ICT products and services

Is the product/service perceived as helping the user to make more environmentally friendly choices? The Human Experience unit at RISE has a broad experience of answering questions related to this in usability tests, where the focus is on the user's understanding and behaviour in sustainable choices.

The goal is to provide insight into the user's experience and use of the product and how we can use simple means to encourage and facilitate, so-called nudging, a more environmentally friendly use of products and services in our society today.

This can be applied to everything from how the packaging of the product should be recycled, how different words, icons, and explanations are perceived, prompts for how and when the product should be charged and not charged, how much energy the product consumes with different types of programmes and in standby mode, to how the product is best recycled or should be maintained to extend the life of the product.

We start from your needs analysis or help you in the choice of the right method of evaluation and implementation, analysis and compilation of the same.

Usability tests

Usability (user-friendliness) can be measured via the ISO standard 9241-11 through efficiency, effectiveness and satisfaction. Based on the same ISO standard and using similar methods, we can measure how clear your eco-friendly features and options are to the user.

In a usability test in our UX Lab, a facility specially designed for usability testing using the latest technology and with usability experts on site, the user performs scenarios that are observed and analysed. For example, we can look at whether the user finds the features that offer more sustainable use and whether the user perceives them as sustainable choices. Other suitable methods for exploring the experience of sustainable features and offers could be field tests, interviews, focus groups or digital surveys. There are many methods and we will help you choose the most effective one to answer your questions based on your needs and process.

Based on our conclusions, we deliver a summary and recommendations on how your product or service can be improved, which is a valuable contribution to decision-making and further development.

High-quality video recordings of the usability tests can be made and then edited into clear summaries, which are useful for further development and for communication and presentation internally to pass on the insights.

9241-11