The Circular Designs Ideation Pack highlights a number of design opportunities for making products and services fit for circular consumption. People often find inconvenient, time-consuming, or otherwise undesirable to transfer products from use to use through circular consumption processes. The practicalities and challenges that circular consumption processes entail can hence contribute to the complete disruption of a circular flow. Addressing such aspects through design is thus essential when developing new products and services better suited to circular consumption.

The tool comprises a set of 38 design strategy cards highlighting opportunities to design for Use2Use. It provides trigger questions and inspirational design examples to stimulate discussion, support ideation activities and spark new ideas. The tool focuses on four main design strategies to consider when aiming to make circular consumption processes more attractive to people: Design for Extended Use, Design for Multiple Use-Cycles, Design for Exchange, and Design for Circular Match-Making.

The Circular Designs Ideation Pack can be used either on its own or after using the Circular Journeys Exploration Pack and the Multiple Use-Cycles Exploration Pack. Using the explorative tools beforehand is beneficial as they’ll give you a better understanding of which design challenges to focus on. Each strategy card, however, has a short introduction describing typical design challenges. These will help you get acquainted with the design challenges that may be addressed with the strategies. The tool can be used by anyone involved in the ideation process but has been specially developed for designers, user researchers, business strategists, product managers and product developers.

Read more about the other Use2Use Design Tools: the Use2Use Thinking Activation Pack, the Circular Journeys Exploration Pack, the Multiple Use-Cycles Exploration Pack, and the Circular Designs Evaluation Pack.