Conference Agenda

To safeguard our planet from the threats of resource depletion, pollution and climate change, a fundamental change in our production, consumption and lifestyle choices is required. Companies and designers play a central role in this transformation and are called to action by implementing New Product Development (NPD) processes for sustainable innovation.

This systematic literature review investigates the intersection between product design, new product development process and sustainability, addressing critical questions: How does design influence the NPD process, driving companies towards circular innovation? What circular design practices have been integrated into NPD processes and how?

The study provides a comprehensive examination of circular design techniques, exploring their strengths, limitations and obstacles to widespread adoption. Furthermore, the analysis charts a path for future research efforts, outlining directions that seek to harmonise NPD design processes with the circular economy, ensuring a balanced and sustainable approach to business innovation.

Product innovation progressively embraces a sustainable and systemic approach, known as Design for Sustainability, driven by economic, environmental, socio-cultural, and behavioral insights. Nevertheless, transitioning to circularity within upholstered furniture Product-Service Systems and fostering cultural awareness remains a complex endeavor. The paper focuses on the role of Circularity Manifestos as cultural drivers in creating public awareness and behavioral change. It begins by analyzing existing cases to uncover the manifestos' underlying meaning, logic, and communication strategies for promoting and implementing circular innovation practices. These findings are subsequently compared with established theories and approaches through a comprehensive literature review and case analysis, revealing potential links between conceptual frameworks and practical circular strategies. This investigation targets the upholstered furniture sector, characterized by significant circularity challenges. It demands a comprehensive design approach guided by designers' expertise in balancing proactive behavioral change with a systemic Design for Sustainability approach.

Japan's Edo society (1603-1868) is often referred to as the 'ultimate circular society' and even offers valuable lessons for the modern circular economy. However, Edo practices cannot be directly applied to the modern world due to differences in past and present social conditions. This research aimed to apply Edo practices to modern society through the following steps. First, we constructed a hypothetical model of the Edo circular economy to show how social factors fostered Edo people's mentalities and behaviors for recycling and reusing. Second, using this model as an analytical framework, we examined modern circular economy practices to understand the differences and similarities between the past and the present. Third, based on this understanding, we developed a pattern language to help reproduce Edo's circular model in modern society. The patterns were used in a workshop and validated as effective for generating ideas to improve the circularity of modern products.

Design’s increasing participation in sustainability raises questions on what sustainability it serves and how. Contextualized in a cartography of sustainability discourse and its four typologies, we establish that design’s efforts on sustainability to date are largely affiliated to the mainstream socio-technological pathway, a continuation of the modernization project deepening the crises. This affiliation, while granting design access to the increasingly active field of sustainability, risks reducing its versatile epistemology to amusing representation. Drawing from Human-Nature Relationships (HNR) research, we propose the utilization of the "sustainability space" as an analytical tool. The processual, embodied, and affective qualities inherent in design are evident in the reconfigured "sustainability space". This analytical lens highlights the unique potential design practice and research holds in becoming a new attractor for an alternative path of sustainability transformation. We offer three research directions and provide key theoretical repertoires for this emerging research agenda.

This essay presents the findings of an exploratory literature review on the evo-lution of Sustainable Interaction Design (SID). Historically, SID has referred to Blevis’s principles of "sustainability through design", related to behavioural change, and "sustainability in design" with a predominant focus on environmental sustainability. However, a significant paradigm shift in the field urges to encompass a third "sustainability in designing" dimension, related more to the design process as emphasised by scholars, now offering methodological guidelines to create sustainable interactions. The study proposes an updated frame of SID starting from its first definitions. Secondly, if environmental sustainability remains crucial, it is no longer considered - by scholars - sufficient to advance sustainable development goals without incorporating the social-economic dimensions. By bridging the gap between SID’s principles, this paper reflects upon how holistically involving these additional dimensions in multiple design process stages will contribute to addressing environmental quality alongside social equity and economic prosperity.

Innovation affords us modern lifestyles filled with advanced technology and social structures; however, such development comes at a significant cost to the planet, posing an existential threat to humanity. In our highly complex and networked world, there is an urgency to achieve more sustainable, just and resilient futures. As design seeks to drive sustainable and systemic change, what is the role of radical innovation? And what do we want it to be? This study revisits and reframes the somewhat ambiguous concept of ‘radical innovation’ to broaden our understanding of its role, impact, and potential. We present a machine-learning-enabled literature review of top-ranking design journals over the past 10 years, examining radical innovation across 37 design research papers. While literature frames radical innovation through a technical and process-orientated lens, we advocate for embracing radical innovation as a deeply human endeavor. Our results highlight opportunities to enable more radical transformations through innovation.