Contact person
Anneli Selvefors
Senior forskare
Contact Anneli
Design for circular use
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!
Purpose
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.
Method
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.
Delivery
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.
