ENABLING DESIGN FOR ENVIRONMENTAL GOOD

SUB REPORT

ECO-DESIGN PRINCIPLES

Associate Professor Simon Lockrey Helen Millicer

Richard Collins Dr Liam Fennessy

Dr Mark Richardson Tanya Rajaratnam Allister Hill

Heico Wesselius Maddison Ryder Dr Juliette Anich

Associate Professor Karli Verghese Tayla Edmunds

Emma Maltby Ilse Laureysens

Patrick Couwenberg Daniele Dalla Vecchia Jan Vangrinsven

Prepared for the

Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water

© Commonwealth of Australia 2022

ECO-DESIGN PRINCIPLES

A literature review was undertaken to first establish key Eco-Design principles and then align these to current fields of practice to build a framework for the participant consortium for consultation. Four seminal texts — Lyle (1996), Braungart and McDonough (2002), Van der Ryn and Cowan (2013), and Penty (2019) — were cross-referenced and correlated alongside other significant works in the field to establish overarching Eco-Design principles.

This Project considers ‘Eco-Design’ as an all-encompassing term to describe any design field that is derived from sustainability-driven intent, aligning with Van der Ryn and Cowan’s (2013) definition as “any form of design that minimises environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes”. Two overarching themes and four key principles emerged.

The themes were:

• Eco-Design delivers ‘sustainable material outcomes’; or real-world material outcomes that lead to ecological, economic, and human health and wellbeing (which is typically approached in a results-focused way)

• Eco-Design is derived from ‘ethical-value approaches’; or a set of values, ethics, and ideologies that result in sustainability-focused actions, (typically approached in a process- focused way)

The Project focused primarily on the former but considered the latter an important inclusion for further investigation, given it is oken difficult to separate physical actions from values and beliefs.

There were several consistent elements underpinning Eco-Design practice that impacted the mechanics of both ‘sustainable material outcomes’ and ‘ethical-value approaches’. The most pervasive is the need for a whole-systems approach that accommodates multiple scales with through-lines for dynamic scalability (i.e. cell, organ, organism, species, ecosystem, planet, universe). Other high-order themes include; fostering regenerative circular material flows without waste or toxicity; dematerialising product design; designing entire product life cycles up-front; taking ownership of big issues and working collaboratively together to solve them; ethically decentering humanity in preference for whole systems wellbeing; and recognising the importance of designing for the needs of specific locality and place when designing for ecological wellbeing. These helped frame the four key Eco-Design principles.

These Eco-Design principles are:

• Principle 1: ‘Regenerative design - transitioning from designing ‘like’ to ‘with’ nature’

— This means collaborating with nature to preserve, promote and regenerate ecosystems, society and culture, paying particular attention to accommodating diversity in each bioregion and place

— This requires transitioning from current eco-efficiency practices that aim to reduce resource use and toxicity, to emerging eco-effectiveness practices that actively collaborate with natural systems for positive returns. Importantly, Eco-Design aims to collaborate with biological systems from the outset, rather than retrofitting biological principles to existing industrial practices

• Principle 2: ‘Think in systems and design for life cycles’

— This means having a long-term, integrative whole systems perspective and approach to design, recognising that each element at every scale is intrinsically intertwined with every ‘other’ (e.g. cell, organism, ecosystem), across life cycles

— This requires practices that embrace complexity, diversity, and scale in transparent and collaborative approaches

— These practices should concurrently develop products, systems, and services to encourage sustainable material use, interdisciplinary collaboration, product customisation, repairability, and emotional attachment for product longevity

• Principle 3: ‘Zero waste - Move from a take-make-waste model to circular economies’

— This means eliminating the concept of waste and removing all toxicity at every life cycle stage

— This requires circular design practices as represented by Braungart and McDonough’s model of the ‘cherry-tree’ (Braungart & McDonough 2002), which encourages closed- loop total-systems approaches for regenerative circular material use, where waste in one cycle becomes nutrient in the next

• Principle 4: ‘Making better design choices - Ethical design for collective wellbeing’

— This means making ethical design choices that bring about the highest possible total well-being, inviting everyone to be involved in designing an abundant and secure future together

— This requires both a common understanding and ethical integrity for both designers and consumers, designing as custodians of the environment, society, and culture and making transparent decisions that ensure the greatest long-term common good.

Four Eco-Design principles in brief

The following sections briefly expand on the above principles. Please see Part C for a Glossary containing an expanded list of terms (each with a corresponding definition) from reviewed literature during the Project, a table of Acronyms with full terms, as well an overview of the literature review method applied during the Project.

Eco-Design principle 1

Regenerative design: transitioning from designing ‘like’ to ‘with’ nature

It is clear current design for sustainability approaches are not delivering the results needed for long-term ecological wellbeing. While there are still some gains to be made in developing more efficient processes, there is a need to transition from an eco-efficiency mindset (or, designing efficient industrial ecosystems that regenerate ‘like’ nature’s systems) to one that brings about eco-effectiveness (or, collaborating ‘with’ nature to re-create waste-free biological systems) (Penty 2019). The following two sections outline the difference between the two, discussing past current, and emerging technologies and approaches.

Eco-efficiency (less bad)

Eco-Design to date has largely focused on improving resource efficiency and reducing toxicity, investigating ways to make more from less. Design for Environment (DfE), for instance, encourages designers to construct products with (more) sustainable materials and processes; for example, using minimal adhesives in manufacturing, minimal packaging throughout the supply chain, and are recoverable at the end of their useful life (Fiksel 2009). Light weighting products also improve resource efficiency by directly reducing the number of materials in products and their associated production and raw material extraction processes (Lewis et al. 2001). Further, increasing the intensity of use over a product’s life cycle, extending usable product life, or delaying end-of-life (also known as EoL), makes better use of resources (Allwood 2012). Delaying end-of- life can be achieved by increasing product quality and function, repairing when components fail rather than replacing and reusing and/or up-cycling at end-of-use (Allwood 2012). Timeless and emotionally durable design helps delay end-of-life by increasing a product’s perceived value and engaging the user in an emotional bond that endures (Chapman 2009).

Lyle (1996) advocates replacing current linear throughput systems with cyclical flows at sources, consumption centres, and sinks, continually replacing through its functional processes the energy and materials of its operation. At a minimum, products should not exist in isolation but be accompanied by systems and services to deal with entire life cycles with zero-waste throughout every stage. A ‘zero waste’ approach advocates the consideration of waste from one life cycle as a ‘nutrient’ for another life cycle or ecosystem (Braungart & McDonough 2002). This can be achieved in both synthetic industrial systems and bio-regenerative systems, but they must be kept mutually exclusive: synthetic systems need to be completely closed-loop to keep non-natural materials out of the environment; bio regenerative systems can be open loop, given bio waste is a nutrient for natural-environment cycles. Both systems require zero toxicity: in synthetic systems, this is especially important for human health and in bio-regenerative systems for ecological health (Braungart & McDonough 2002).

Importantly, whole systems need to be considered when designing low-energy and water- consuming products, with savings to be considered across the whole life cycle, from raw material extraction through to end-use and end-of-life (Kobayashi 2006; Wong 2009). This aligns Eco-Design principles 1 and 2. Further, whole systems need to be scrutinised at multiple scales, reflecting the influence of large scales on small, and vice versa, collaborating with

nature wherever possible to produce designs with the greatest level of internal integrity and coherence (Van der Ryn and Cowan 2013). Biomimicry strongly advocates whole systems thinking, emulating the complex circularity of biological systems and beneficially evolving with nature without environmental detriment (Beynus 1997). As an eco-efficiency strategy, it comes closest to eco-effectiveness principles.

Eco-effectiveness (more good)

Eco-effectiveness is where industry and society actively collaborate ‘with’ nature and/ or re- create biology and sustainable design activity here closely resembles waste-free biological systems (Penty 2019). Biodesign, for instance, is a rapidly growing field that expands on the principles of biomimicry to involve living organisms as building blocks and material sources in product design. It collaborates with nature to produce products and systems like organically derived compostable products, energy generators, and organic computers from bacteria, algae, and other organically derived materials (Grushkin 2021). Using nature to directly produce products is particularly appealing in this respect. Waste, for instance, can be used as a regenerative feedstock (as it is in natural cycles) and if suited to the environment it is fed into naturally conserving other resource inputs.

Regenerative design relates to approaches that support the co-evolution of human and natural systems in a partnered relationship, thus building both social and natural capital concurrently (Cole 2012). Biodegradable and bioresorbable electronics, for instance, show promise in tackling toxic electronic waste, particularly given they can be returned to nature at end-of-life rather than needing to be recovered and recycled. Current performance does not yet match existing electronics, but with further research and expanding the number of usable materials, the field is likely to grow (Zvezdin et al. 2020). These developments demonstrate a far more natural, collaborative approach to product design.

‘Green economies’ (Loiseau 2016) and ‘blue economies’ (Pauli 2010) both incorporate material strategies to address climate mitigation and adoption of sustainability principles and material outcomes. The green economy as a concept has tended to apply a cost premium for its products which are passed on to consumers, whereas blue economic approaches look for innovations based on every day for little or no start-up investment. Blue economy practices advocate step-change processes where needed, but seek to add value to current processes where possible (Driesenaar 2019). ‘Teal organisations’ advocate resilient sustainable economies, relying on relationships, cooperation, and common purpose at a local level to tackle local issues for global impact. This tends towards policy aimed at facilitating economies of scope rather than the scale at the outset, with scale-up in socially embedded, adaptable, resilient, rhizomatic, and distributed ways (Laloux 2016).

Eco-Design principle 2

Think in systems and design for life cycles

Thinking in systems requires designers, manufacturers, commissioning customers, and regulators, among many others, to consider the total impacts of every product design within broader natural and industrial ecosystems. The life-cycle of a product is an inventory of total energy, materials, and by-products that go into and come out of, product creation product creation: where designers require a systems-thinking mindset operationalised through tools for ideating, mapping, and coordinating pro-sustainability outcomes (Penty 2019). However, designers and manufacturers are oken unaware and/ or not required to do this. Designers need to be grounded in both; eco-literacy, the fundamental principles that govern how living systems

work to specific situations and conditions; and pattern literacy, being able to read, understand and generate appropriate, harmonious and enabling products, systems, services and behaviour (Mang 2020). This requires a scalable-systems mindset, or what Van der Ryn & Cowan (2013) term ‘scale linking’ where designers “integrate our design processes across multiple levels of scale and make these processes compatible with natural cycles of water, energy, and materials”

— or a whole systems design approach.

Whole systems design requires life cycle modelling, which includes all processes for addressing societal needs, including materials production through end-of-life management, and links production and consumption activities with a comprehensive accounting of sustainability performance. This provides key metrics that can be used by designers that in turn help stakeholders manage and control the life-cycle impacts of systems they design and guide their improvement (Keoleian 2006). While whole systems tools to negotiate the massive complexity at the heart of Eco-Design are currently lacking, precedents exist on smaller scales in fields such as life-cycle assessment (LCA) and product service systems (PSS) design. LCA, for instance, has served as a tool for several decades to quantify environmental performance over the entire life-cycle of products, providing analysis of inputs, outputs, and impacts of material streams, toxicity, energy, and water use to provide designers with key data to make better design choices in the design phase (Lockrey 2011). PSS design combines products with services to improve the total user experience (Tukker 2006), but also allows businesses to track products, stay in contact with users, adapt to changing needs over time, and plan for material continuity at the end of life for the circular economy (Morelli 2002). This will become easier as an increasing number of products introduce connective capability through the ‘internet of things’ (which, on the flip side, poses concerns about net increases in domestic energy consumption). Service design endeavours to design positive user experiences across whole product and production life-cycles, collaborating with users of a service and building relationships between stakeholders to open up communication for the exchange and development of value and knowledge (Kimbell 2009). Services can replace material products as a dematerialisation strategy, particularly where subscription services allow intensification of product use. Digital services can also track and log material flows, energy, water, and toxicity, directly communicating them with producers and end-users and providing transparency.

Product modularity at a component level is a key constituent of adaptable and variable product design, allowing products to be updated according to need, disassembled, reassembled, and reused for multiple applications and separated into constituent parts for recycling at end-of- life (Sonego, Echeveste & Debarba 2018). Given adaptability, repairability and reusability are inherent in many modular systems, it is a desirable constituent of a circular economy. For it to improve product sustainability, modularity needs to be better understood, enabled, and adopted by designers and decision-makers, both in the design-to-production stage, but more broadly by changing the enabling levers such as pricing, regulatory, structural, and behavioural systems.

Eco-Design promotes a symbiosis between culture and nature and empowers individuals at all levels to contribute to the design process by responding to the specific needs of local bioregions (Van der Ryn & Cowan 2013). Open design (Raasch, Herstatt & Balka 2009) provides ways to engage end-users in making a change in their own lives and those around them by being involved in design projects and modifying content to apply more closely to their specific needs, place, and community (Richardson 2016). This can be particularly powerful when sitting alongside distributed local manufacturing, which allows products to be adapted to local culture,

knowledge, technology, materials, and ecosystems. Advanced manufacturing technologies and internet connectivity allow a return to localised industry (Kohtala 2015). Much of the necessary tools and processes for the new frontier of ’Industry 4.0’ already exist, but a whole systems platform to integrate the parts is yet to be developed (Wu, D et al. 2015). Critical to the success of ‘Industry 4.0’ are the systems and services at the backend, which if developed to include Eco-Design principles could encourage sustainable, resilient, distributed local, and flexible niche manufacturing.

Eco-Design principle 3

Move from a take-make-waste model to circular economies

The foundations of the circular economy concept have been evolving over many decades through various phases (Blomsma & Brennan 2017; Reike, Vermeulen & Witjes 2018; Winans, Kendall & Deng 2017). These phases represent conceptualisations and terminologies from a variety of fields across academia, industry, government, and civil society centred on the idea that the environmental, social, and economic implications of the linear, or take-make-waste model, are unsustainable. Circular economies are grounded in the idea that the designing of closed-loop processes can retain the material and embodied energy inside a system of use and exchange: thereby reducing the demand for new or virgin resources for production and consumption.

The concept of the circular economy moves away from product-centric design to designing complex scalable systems to support cradle-to-cradle production and consumption (repairing, remanufacturing, repurposing, reusing, and recycling). Broadly speaking it can be defined as a reticulating system in which waste outputs from one life cycle become resource inputs for another, resulting in reduced resource, emissions, energy, and water use. Products are valued not from their specific utility and affordances, but by the intrinsic economic value of their materials, processes, and supporting systems throughout their continual life cycles.

The Ellen MacArthur Foundation (EMF) describes three core agendas for a circular economy, being: design out waste and pollution; keep products and materials in use; and regenerate natural systems (Ellen MacArthur Foundation 2016). For product design, the first two occupy the most immediate challenge in enabling the latter to shik the value of a product from notions of its specific utility to the intrinsic value of its materials throughout various life cycles through the economy. The EMF has undertaken significant work in advocating for, supporting, and disseminating circular economy principles (Stahel 2019). A highly cited organisation in the literature, the EMF tends to present circular economy as an ‘alternative growth discourse’ (Ghisellini, Cialani & Ulgiati 2016) that sits awkwardly to the ‘de-growth’ orientations of earlier conceptualisations of circular economy (Boulding 1966; Pearce & Kerry 1990). This orientation to a circular economy, as a means by which economic growth can be underpinned, has been widely picked up by the consulting sector (Hannon, Kuhlmann & Thaidigsmann 2016; Hestin, Chanoine & Menten 2016; Lacy et al.) with the sustainable promise, or potential, of facilitating a ‘decoupling’ of the requirement of resource use for economic growth (UNEP 2011) – a subject of some critique (Gregson et al. 2015; Lazarevic & Valve 2017).

UNEP’s Circularity Platform (see Figure 1) offers a similar model to that of EMF, but it differs in that it attempts to speak directly to the relationships between the actors, and their actions (in the abstract) in the activation of production and consumption loops. In doing so it emphasises the value of specific value retention options in the realisation and maintenance of a circular economy.

The development of the circular economy concept crosses multiple fields and requires design thinking, and cross-disciplinary collaboration, to inform strategies to enable the circulation, and re-circulation of resources in the system to avoid loss. As a complex and evolving model, it; invariably has local and sector-specific characteristics that must be considered closely by design; is enabled through large-scale cross-economy policy levers; and is subject to ongoing debate and redefinition in academic, governance, and industry contexts.

Related circular economy design practices include; design for slowing, closing and narrowing resource loops. Slowing resource loops includes: access and performance models; extending product value models; and classic long life and sufficiency models. Closing resource loops include design for; extending resource value; and industrial symbiosis models (Bocken et al. 2014). Narrowing resource loops consist of; resource efficiency approaches such as design for light-weighting and product/ production efficiency; and design concerning resource value retention options this report for further definitions of these design methods (Reike, Vermeulen & Witjes 2018). For the latter, client or user choices function as shorter loops of value retention which include options to design for; refusal (Bilitewski 2012); reduction (Lieder & Rashid 2016; Sihvonen & Ritola 2015; Worrell & Reuter 2014); reselling / re-using (de Brito & Dekker 2004; Ghisellini, Cialani & Ulgiati 2016); repair (den Hollander, M & Bakker 2012); refurbishment (de Brito & Dekker 2004); remanufacturing (Go, Wahab & Hishamuddin 2015; Lieder & Rashid 2016); and repurposing (Sihvonen & Ritola 2015; Van Buren et al. 2016). Downcycling strategies function in long loops of value retention and include; recycling; recovery; energy (Worrell & Reuter 2014); and re-mining (Cossu & Williams 2015).

Eco-Design principle 4

Making better design choices: Ethical design for collective wellbeing

The previous three principles have spoken to Eco-Design from a material outcomes perspective more so than ethical value approaches. This section speaks primarily to the ethics of Eco- Design, given sustainability is deeply tied to an ethic of well-being for the earth as a whole system. Norman and Draper (1986) approach the ethics of design from a user-centred perspective where designers study people’s activity, structures, interactions, and systems, and through theoretical analysis, trial systems, and observing and questioning end users, make informed design decisions. Buchanan (2001) and van der Bijl-Brouwer and Dorst (2017) invite us to take on more political dimensions, basing an ethical design on human dignity and human rights to make better design choices concerning people collectively. Sheehan (2011), Barad (2007), and Fry (2009) ask for consideration of the ethics of design beyond humanity, extending respect, care, and protection to all elements of our planet.

Sustainability requires cultural and end-use behaviour change and Eco-Design needs to foster culturally embedded sustainable behaviour with the combined participation of individuals and communities. This challenge requires an ethical approach through design practice to induce positive cultural change (Mulvenna, Boger & Bond 2017). However, the variabilities of design practice and ethical positions of designers, call for standardised ethics training in design education, industry-standard codes of practice, government policy and regulation, and opens opportunities for ethical consultancy businesses (Fry 2009).

Related design practices include ‘people-centred’ methods. Design is primarily designed for people, but increasingly, designers are designing with people to better understand the nuances and complexities of individual needs and how they relate to the needs of the broader community. Co-design/ participatory designers — either internal to companies or external consultants — work with people to identify and tackle issues through multiple cycles of listening, exchanging, and reflecting. This can be seen as a process of iteratively infrastructure adaptable socio-material systems through design action (Huybrechts, Benesch & Geib 2017). Participatory practices are oken used in design for social impact (see Rittner n.d.) and design for social innovation (see Chick 2012). While not always Eco-Design focused, they almost always aim to foster well-being and can be harnessed to empower citizens to positively change their environments, communities, families, and mental health for the better.

The Project team acknowledges the Western perception of humankind within the context of natural systems and suggests that Indigenous approaches to country, place, and relationships (Moran 2018), and a ‘more-than-human’ mindset is required for design to become truly sustainable (Gaziulusoy & Erdoğan Öztekin 2019). The Eco-Design literature is clear in calling for humanity to better respect the ecological context. A ‘more-than-human-turn’ recognises the reciprocal relationships between humans and non-humans in a delicately balanced ecosystem (Forlano 2017). In this respect, there is a call to learn from Indigenous approaches where learning stems from observing and understanding connections between elements within the whole earth system. Indigenous knowledge favour sustainment over consumption, contextualising individuality within place and community for the common good (Moran 2018). This view acknowledges that agency has a ‘placial’ origin and its unique characteristics should form the backbone of any project (Graham 2009). In this sense, it is important that design translates Indigenous approaches with integrity and respect.

The Eco-Design principles above were used to inform the various ‘cross-cutting’ influences on design aimed at environmental good explored in the next section. These influences are explored as to how they might be enacted as levers, to activate a pathway from old, linear models of design to the circular, regenerative, systems-based modes of design practice for the future.