Conference Agenda

A functioning circular economy relies on households recirculating products once they are no longer needed. However, households often accumulate products in wardrobes, cupboards, and other storage spaces. While contemporary design practices often reinforce this through encouraging new purchases and attachment, unlocking dormant products for reuse emerges as a new challenge for design. This paper draws on a systems analysis of how products move into, around, and sometimes out of the home, based on household interviews and visits. The analysis reveals how products slip out of use and become forgotten as stored mass, requiring significant effort to recirculate. We identify key leverage points where designers, together with circular economy stakeholders, can intervene to support increased product recirculation. Based on workshops with circular designers, we articulate and exemplify a set of design strategies, showing an expanded understanding of design’s role in enabling product circulation within the deeper layers of everyday life.

This paper examines how systemic designers in health navigate plural perspectives and overlapping quality regimes. We introduce the Playground of Design as four interconnected spaces of problem, design, change, and solution, together with four R’s, Rapidness, Rigour, Relevance, and Resonance, as conversational lenses for articulating design rationale in plural settings. Two Dutch cases illustrate this approach. Bias Blaster, a serious game for adolescents recovering from psychosis, is reread retrospectively to reconstruct systemic design rationale. E-Health Junior, a long-running e-health consortium, is reconstructed through interviews and translated into a pedagogical workshop for perspective-taking. We argue that combining the Playground of Design with the four R’s helps make systemic design rationale more explicit and discussable, enabling designers and educators to engage plural quality regimes without flattening their differences.

Food waste presents a significant global environmental and economic challenge. Australian households are responsible for 40% of discarded food, with unclear date labelling and storage advice creating consumer confusion, contributing to the problem. This research employed systems thinking and pluralism to address consumer confusion. A multi-level analytical framework integrating visual grammar, symbolic interactionism, and activity theory examined semiotic dimensions, interactions, and system behaviours within the food packaging system. Micro-level prototyping generated design concepts for date labels and storage advice. Meso-level collective intelligence-participatory design techniques evaluated the designs and brainstormed solutions. Scenario planning at the macro level used morphological analysis to generate insights and develop future scenarios. Findings reveal misaligned activity systems among consumers (assess), industry (communicate), and policymakers (regulate), highlighting the need for system-wide collaborative design rather than policy alone. This pluralist approach offers a replicable framework for tackling wicked design problems beyond food waste.

Donella Meadows’ concept of leverage points - places in complex systems where small shifts may lead to fundamental changes in the system as a whole - is gaining attention for developing a 'leverage points perspective' on systems transformation. Distinguishing a 'system of interest' as well as identifying 'where' and 'how' to intervene for 'whom' are all matters of practical relevance which remain to be properly addressed. We contribute an inquiry protocol to identify opportunities for design actions aiming to trigger transformation in complex human systems. Our system of interest for empirical study is the informal trade ecosystem at the borderlands of the East African Community. We describe the rationale and logic for methodological development of an inquiry protocol which sequentially integrates contextual research and user inquiry with open-ended exploration at inception to identify and describe intervention points. This deepens a previously contributed study from the same project to DRS 2018.

Smart Product-Service Systems (SPSS) design recognises the need to engage diverse stakeholders, yet traditional design approaches often overlook entities critical in the operationalisation of a SPSS - contextual users, regulators, AI entities - until late implementation stages. This paper argues that entity identification in SPSS design requires interrogating underlying assumptions about which entities matter and why. Drawing from systems thinking and human-centred design, the paper proposes a multi-dimensional framework for reconceptualising entities that warrant design consideration. Rather than presenting a neutral taxonomy, the framework provides structure for examining how design assumptions determine which perspectives are centred and which are overlooked in early-stage design process. Five functional entity categories are proposed, each representing different forms of participation in SPSS and different types of design relevance. The framework nudges designers to reflect critically on entity identification practices, creates a focus on the full ecosystem of entities on whose interdependence SPSS outcomes depend.

Innovation in textile production and usage is gaining momentum, driven by both the urgent need for sustainable solutions and rising technological maturity of embedded functionalities in textiles. Traditional linear models of production and consumption are increasingly being replaced by product-service systems (PSS) that can extend product lifecycles through maintenance, reuse, and digital integration. Realizing the full potential of such innovations requires addressing complex interdependencies which are currently lacking within the day-to-day reality of textile innovation projects. We recognize Causal Loop Diagrams (CLDs) for their potential to gain insight into these complexities, but their intricacy limits their use in practice. In this paper we use a specific case to introduce CLD adaptations that can serve as practice-oriented tools for three phases in complex textile product development trajectories. We discuss how the tools could be used by product innovation teams and suggest future work on these and similar practice-oriented tools.