2020 WITH NEW & ADJUSTED GOALS

Highlights 2019

I’m back! The best wishes for this new decade.

Looking back on 2019: First, I realise that I didn’t write an update in such a long time. Of course, so much has happened since. Both in my personal and my professional life. In one of my last blogs I wrote about the acceptance of the abstract I submitted for the 3rd PLATE conference (more about this below)

In 2019, I actually traveled a lot (for work) and also felt guilty about it, since I am working in the sustainability field. Yet, I tried to travel by train (instead of by plain) as much as I could. A list of journeys that I made:

• In May I went to Barcelona to attend the Acceleration workshop hosted by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. This workshop formed a key moment to share insights from the project on circular economy competencies building within businesses. Based on this project I also wrote an academic paper that I submitted for the PLATE conference.

• In September I went to Germany to present my paper on circular economy competencies for design at the 3rd PLATE conference (more about this below). Making this trip by train was really convenient as I could just get in in Rotterdam, where I live and 6 hours laters I was in Berlin. After being back for a weekend from this conference I went to London to be part of a brainstorm about communicating circular economy held at the Dragen Rouge head office and hosted by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation. I cannot share too much about the results of this workshop as it was a closed workshop.

3rd PLATE Conference PhD Morning Workshop

3rd PLATE Conference

In september I presented my paper ‘Design competencies for a circular economy’, which you can find here. The proceedings will be published soon as well in the form of a book. The conference started of great with a PhD Morning in which I met PhDs that are all working on topics related to product lifetimes and circular economy. The same workshop was held at the 2nd PLATE conference in Delft, when I was the host so it was great to see so many of my peers again and learn about how their thinking has progressed. It also was great to learn more from other perspectives and the exercises allowed us to dig more into obsolescence, product life times and design.

3rd PLATE Conference | Workshop on product care

During the PLATE conference, I also participated in a few workshop, which are often used to present and/or tools. The workshop on a tool to help designers consider product care strategies during the design process was quite an interesting. Part of my research goal is to identify which competencies designers need to develop to be able to design for a circular economy. Yet, another part is to make a first attempt at developing a tool to help designers to acquire these so called ‘circular design’ competencies. This tool was insightful as it also centered different consumers, their preferences, triggers and helped to identify possible strategies that would work with both product as well as user. Of course, it might be hard to stimulate/influence user behaviour, but in my opinion reminder designers to consider this could be a way to influence product lifetimes.

Resolutions, goals (or however you want to call it)

• This year, I am hoping to keep blogging about my life as a PhD Candidate. I also want to challenge myself to not necessarily do it perfectly or tell everything in all details, but just to keep it short and post more in between. I noticed that part of the reason I have not been posting so much was that I made a such a big thing to tell sooo freaking much! For example, I still have some pictures about Dutch Design Week which I visited back in October and where I saw a big shit towards more project centred around sustainability and where I participated in a cool workshop. Might still share, but feel free to also look at my socials (instagram, facebook and whatnot)

• Next, I have some ideas about disseminating my work and ideas both on a personal and a professional level. Respectively, through a podcast or blogging, where I would like to talk about circular economy washing and how users could be more aware of what they are consuming (starting with myself), and working with tool/method/workshop developers to develop tools for designers to help them design for a circular economy.

• In addition, I want to submit two papers this years to journals, write my doctoral thesis and defend after almost 4 years of work. Exciting but also scary to be honest.

• Lastly, I am looking to share more about my personal life. Especially about my hobby (that has escalated a bit): I am a (parttime) DJ. Once in a while I get to play my favourite music at clubs. I started taking classes in April 2018, just for fun. In 2019 it has developed on something more serious whereby I got to play in some venues in my hometown Rotterdam. These two contrasting professions (researcher and DJ) are at times hard to unite. Sometimes I get a lot of confused looks when I explain to peers that I DJ, but for now I like to do both as it keeps me happy.

That’s it!

27 AND SLACKING?

Public announcement if you haven’t realised yet: I am switching to writing monthly PhD Updates from now on.  Yet, the last month has been eventful to say the least. Next to turning 27, almost month ago, I have been working on multiple projects. 

First of all, I have been super eager to turn my essay into a possible thesis chapter. I realised in that process that while the essay writing has helped to structure my thinking and uncover where I might be making illogical or too big steps in my story. Writing a thesis chapter proved to bet too big of a step for now. Through meetings with my supervisors I realized that—ambitious as I am— that I was trying to describe the world and include all details. Instead, I was adviced to keep it small and include only the relevant topics (me: but everything is important, right?). While I initially thought I was slacking cause it took me so long to describe everything, I realised that I should tone down my ambitions and that I can should be super happy with my progress. In short, writing is a long and sometimes tedious process, but I feel like I'm getting better at it every day. Deciding to write a blog has helped me improve my writing as well. 

My main view towards why my research is relevant: design for a circular economy expands the design for sustainability domain, resulting in a re-evalution and possible expansion of the sustainable design competencies  Why, you might ask? While the design for sustainability domain has been expanding the focus has mostly been on social and environmental topics (looking at literature). Looking at (design for) sustainability from a business perspective there can be said that is has been mostly culminated in CSR. The circular economy has put an emphasis on developing viable solutions that contribute to sustainable futures. This results in design increasingly having to  consider the business model aspects while simultaneously developing the product. In addition, value recover (vs. value destroyed after sales) asks for design to consider the whole system (e.g., engaging customers to bring back products, determining reverse logistics implications, 

Second, the circular design interviews. In the interviews I have conducted with design practitioners working in the circular design space, I encountered a lot of challenges that could be equated with sustainability dilemmas. For example, using recycled content in products. While this results in a lower input of virgin materials (and thus not having to mine and produce new materials) this could mean a higher use of the recycled materials or creating a product that doesn’t last as long. Thinking about all these sustainability dilemmas that the designers get confronted with,  I was wondering whether the designers that are currently being trained should just know that when in their work they will encounter this or whether they should actually get access to more predictive tools that could help them review the consequences of different scenarios. One of the tools that focuses on this is the circularity calculator developed by IDEO, but what other tools are there out there? Could it be that designers need to learn about the nuts and bolts or is does it require them to just deal with uncertainty? 

A last, more indirect reflection, in relation to the interviews is about the fact that there are different perspectives towards the circular economy. While, as an academic, I have one view as to what circular economy is about… the interviewee might have another one. For example, I see circular economy as a way to contribute to a sustainable future. Deducing from that, my interest goes out to talk to practitioners who are rethinking current solutions and even (re)designing solutions to eventually create a system without waste. However, does that  mean that a designer working with waste streams to solve the current waste problem is not doing circular activities? I find myself constantly moving between what they call the more absolute, theoretical view on sustainability and a more relative practical approach used in the real world.

Enough contemplations for this time. Some good news! The abstract that I submitted in January for the PLATE conference 2019 in Berlin, has been accepted, so I have to work my ass off in the upcoming month to write and submit the full paper in June. I will also be analysing interviews that I have done with 10 design practitioners in the previous months and extending my theoretical framework. Moreover, I am involved as an expert in the supervisory team of a graduation student and will be finishing of a collaborative project. More about the outcomes in the next blog.  In addition, I started a course called Design your next Career Move. It might seem early, but three years have almost passed. So. while I am aiming to submit 3 more papers by the end of this year I also have to start thinking about what I want to do next because this year will be over in a heartbeat as well. 

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Interesting pilots that I have encountered in the last months:

• Ikea planning to do a lease of a furniture set (€30 p/m) to students. This article (in Dutch) talks about what the perceived benefits are and indirectly touches upon whether it makes sense for the students to use this.

• H&M aiming for more transparency by opening up about its supplier list and locations. I’m looking forward to see what other brands will do.

ESSAY WRITING

Hey there!

A ride with the Van.Eko Be.e electric scooter after the interview on 26 Feb

Another blog about the trails and tribulations of being a PhD Candidate . The last month I did slightly different things than I had planned (who doesn’t, right?). I spoke to so many interesting designers working in the CE space, discussing the opportunities and challenges they see. One interview that I would like to highlight, because he did give me the permission to share more widely beyond my research, is the interview-turned-extended-talk-about-sustainability-and-life with the founder of van.Eko. The company makes electric scooters with a monocoque frame made from bio-based material. While the scooters are currently being sold, the idea was initially to offer them in a lease model to customers, who than were able to also lease it again to other customers. I learned from this that being an ambitious and passionate design/entrepreneur or impatient revolutionary (in the terms of Geels, 2011) in the sustainability space, costs a perseverance. From trying to get funding to facing different trade-offs in the attempt to contribute to sustainability. Most importantly, the conversation really helped me sharpen my thoughts when it comes to how I see circular economy and sustainability. This helped me improve my essay along the way. The pending title is:

Image reflecting the absolute view towards sustainability and underlying approaches.

Design for a Circular economy: An emerging concept within the Design for sustainability domain

Image reflecting the relative view towards sustainability and underlying approaches.

There are different worldsviews to sustainability, which in wider terms are categorised as the absolute view and the relative view towards sustainability (Faber et al. 2005). The first one looks at the planetary boundaries and is quantification of bio-sphere processes and limiting growth (e.g., Limits to Growth - Meadows et al, 1972). This might be seen as utopian, but it is in line with the alarming rate at which the resources of the planet are being used. The latter looks at gradually working towards a sustainable world. Looking at circular economy with that lens therefore means that it could contribute to sustainability (i.e., where the two domains overlap is whether there is the win-win situation).. However the focus it not exclusively on creating the sustainable world. Then there is a third view which is rooted in transition theories and transition management.

This view connects the two extremes (i.e., the relative and the absolute view) and to my current understanding and conceptualisation aims to go from the gradual incremental view towards the (maybe) utopian completely sustainable world in which we stay within planetary boundaries, understand that there are limited to growth, and promote dematerialisation. In conversation with and supported by one of my supervisor recently I managed to explicate how I see them. In the upcoming weeks I am working out these thoughts in more detail, because as I have described them here they might appear a bit rough.

In addition, I will be continuing interviews with more circular design pioneers, facilitating online focus group calls with a view large companies that are aiming to make the transition and I will be working out some new paper ideas.

Interesting links this week:

• EMF is searching for its next back of circular economy pioneers

• Katie Whalen, another PhD Candidate in the game, and designers of the In the Loop Game is starting up a podcast. In this podcast she and her guest will uncover what circular economy means in practice and explore the progress to a more circular society. Katie Whalen interviews a new circular economy expert each week about what they’re doing and learning. Episodes released each Monday @12 CET

REACHING OUT

It has already been a month ago that I wrote a last block. Per usual a lot of movement in the several research projects I’m working on. To get an overview of all the data I still need to gather before the end of my PhD I started working on my thesis planning. While I had the bigger picture in mind, it took a lot of time to put everything in a logical and workable sequence. Obviously not something that I could do in half a day (what was I thinking?). However, a super valuable exercise because it made me realise that I was lacking some information when it comes to which projects would make the most sense to execute in the remaining 20 months.

Thesis Planning

Up next, I did some thinking around my a thesis structure: what is the message I want to get across, how can I tell it and how to ensure this is a rigorous representation of the research I did? Based on the single case study that I have done up till now I derived four design competencies for a circular economy. However, these need further work, such as

1. Validation and expansion of the initial list in the form of addition interviews with designers from practice (more on this later) ,

2. Quantification in the form of surveys and

3. Comparison with the current state of design education. How else can I say what competencies the design education community should add to the curriculum in the area design for sustainability?

The feedback on my first every thesis outline (many more to follow) has been that the practical relevance is clear, but what will be my theoretical contribution? How do I see sustainability and circular economy? Are they the same…? Is circular economy something totally new and substantially different from sustainability? Might sound a bit boring, but I’ll be working on some essays about my vision as this will help me me develop my theoretical framework and influence the positioning of my further work. Interesting papers within this regard are: Sauvé et al (2016), Geissdoerfer et al (2017) and Kirchherr (2017). So, expect my upcoming blogs to be more essay-like (is that a word?) I’m super happy to continue discussion about this in real life so I can develop my thinking as well.

What I will also do next to writing my Sustainability - Circular Economy tension essay is:

1. Starring as a coach in the circular product design course that starts next week. It’s a blended learning course in which the mooc: circular economy: an introduction, is integrated. This is an entry-level free online mooc, accessible to the wider audience as well. So, it is definitely worth checking it out.

2. Continuing to have a lot of calls for the circular economy skills and competencies projects, which involves a few larger organisations. Hopefully, I can say more about this towards the end of May or June when there is a mid-term presentation for the wider audience.

3. Conducting a lot of interview with designers from practice who are involved in circular economy projects. This week I had my first interview with a designers who is involved in upcycling waste materials. Now that the company has gained some experience on this topic by doing it themselves, it is moving in more of a consultancy role in which it advices other companies. My main learning here is that there is a lot of rationale regarding why we should have a circular economy, but how to actually get there is a bit unclear. As of such, a small company that is trying to make waves has to teach itself and is developing its own methodologies. I’m looking to interview more designers working on circular solutions in companies (micro-sized to large corporates) , meaning closing (i.e., recycling and upcycling) and preferably slowing (reuse, refurbishing, remanufacturing) loops. If you happen to know some inspiring individuals who fit the profile, please contact me!

30 January 2019 | Taboeloos Innoveren: Maatschappelijk Verantwoord Onderuitgaan

Interesting events and articles of the last month:

• Taboeloos innoveren: An event organised by People House about sustainably/socially responsible entrepreneurship. Four entrepreneurs from Dopper, Yumeko, Loopalife and the Plastic Soup Foundation, told some stories about their “failures”. I liked the concept because it showed that the successful entrepreneur also face obstacles. However, they learned and continued realising their dream. Having attempted to also create my own startup and having ‘failed’ at it, it did inspire me to push through. During the night there was also some room for reflection about what socially/sustainably responsible entrepreneurship is whether there a right way to do it. A quite challenging question that will also be part of my thinking when I’m writing the essay.

• Ikea is planning to rent out their furniture. Seems like a challenging step for such a big corporate, so I’ll definitely follow their story and am hoping to talk to some designers who are involved in this project. Do you have som connections, contact me!

NEW YEAR : NEW RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

Happy new year (I think it’s still ok to say that the second week of January… right?)

After a two week full rest (i.e., no planning, being with family and friends and just overall relax mode), I slowly had to get into the daily routine of work. While I have not been in full beast mode yes, the week has been great:

• A first timer: submitting an extended abstract ahead of time. I think these planning and time management tips from the effective management course I took last year have been paying off. I handed in an abstract for the PLATE conference which will be held later this year in September. In short it’s about a validation study that I am planning to do (i.e., validating an overview of circular design competencies which were collected from literature and a round of fieldwork). But to be honest… the real fun has yet to start as I’m planning to do 20 + interviews with designers from practice. Looking forward to engaging with practitioners again. But to be honest I am semi-excited about / semi-dreading the super load of messy data that I will have to go through.

• My research proposal for a collaboration project on circular economy skills and knowledge was well received. This means more opportunities for data collection from high level companies.

• The Bachelor Circular Product Design course will be starting soon. This year I’ll be involved in the full course from start to end. Fun fact 120 students signed up (while we expected maybe half), which means a huge load of individuals learning about circular economy and designing for it. However, it demands a lot of organization and of course…. grading. Yeah… grading will be fun (haha). I hope that my (little bit of) experience from grading in previous years might help this year. More importantly I am enthusiastic about gaining insights regarding how students learn about CE, what the obstacles are and get some first insights into circular economy competencies for design education.

All in all, it seems like I’m heading into a crazy busy, but probably similarly rewarding couple of months!

See you in two weeks.

A JOURNEY OF SELF-DEVELOPMENT

What an eventful two weeks have I had (and it’s not even Christmas yet). They were mainly filled with following courses and attending a circular economy event. So, my blog is a bit longer than usual.

Course

I followed a bunch of courses to help me improve my research content, develop myself in areas such as time management, and learn some techniques to manage stress.

First of all a course that blew away my mind. The Creative and Critical Thinking course. A course on logical thinking, structuring and socratic reasoning. The course focused on writing a proposition. At the TU Delft (and probably more universities) a maximum of 10 opposable and defendable propositions should accompany your thesis. So, it seems to me that it is quite important to know more about the type of claims (e.g., normative, descriptive etc.) there are, the type of assumptions and reasoning structures (e.g., inductive, deductive etc.) these are based on, possible fallacies (which you definitely do not want to commit). Through formulating and discussing my proposition I learned to look more critically at what I am stating and what the underlying assumptions are. I also learned to be aware what the frame is from which I am making looking at a certain claim. We were also asked to look at the proposition from other frames and to formulate arguments for and against the claim based on these differing frames. A very helpful exercise that I will be using more explicitly in my daily work. The small group of 6 PhD candidates made it easy to interact and the very compelling teacher, when asked, was happy to elaborate on specific topics and provide additional examples to clarify certain concepts. The course took three Friday mornings, but in my personal opinion it should be extended so you could go more in depth.

Secondly, the Effective Management of your PhD course: a course that took two mornings. The main take aways from the first morning were to break down the main research question of the PhD in subresearch questions (and so on), which are mutually exclusive. In addition, we were urged to state the hypotheses behind the questions in order to have a clear view of what we are trying to confirm (or not) by answering the research question. The second morning, was more about time management. Here the lecturer based his lecture on Tim Allen’s book Getting Things Done. Which is based on listing everything you need to, categorizing it in a meaningful way to you, allocating time in your agenda for taks that take more than 2 minutes working on one task at a time and moving on when this task is finished. While this may come across as super structured, using this method, together with my bullet journal, helps me to keep some form of “sanity” haha. Through some discussion with some colleagues, I also noticed that a lot of my time was lost by checking emails and social media during the day. Based on the take aways from this article, shared in the class, I now choose to allocate time in my agenda to spend on this (instead of being available all the time). Secondly, to prepare for meetings I trail ran this method to create meeting agendas. Basically, I include the questions that I want my supervisors to think about instead of merely the topics, I explicitly state the time we have to talk about specific subjects, the process to go through them and, most importantly, what I want to get out of the discussion. I might be able to say more about whether this worked out in a couple of months (let’s hope I won’t forget). These may seem like trivial tips, but it does help me loads to apply these and keep being organised. I realised that I should be less rigid and build in some flexibility as well, because there are definitely interruptions during the day.
Lastly, I am in the process of completing the Brain Management course. A course on how the brain works and that centers around teaching techniques regarding relaxation, stress management, and increased focus and concentration. The course is based on the Silva method. The main take-aways for me are related to creating some space in my daily life to apply the exercises. So, one of my goals is to try and build in some moments during the day for relaxation (morning, noon and evening) so that I can prevent myself from feeling overworked. I also, want to apply the techniques to increase my concentration when working on specific tasks.

De Nationale Denktank

On December 10, I went to the final presentation of the Nationale Denktank which took place in the beautiful Planetarium of Artis. This year the students were asked to come up with solutions to accelerate the transition towards a circular economy. During the event the students presented ideas. They will either continue working on the ideas now that or they will transfer the project to others who will continue the project. It was very interesting to see the concrete ideas the students came up with in a timeframe of just 4 months.

If I may be a bit critical: I missed an idea that was focused on tacking the current problems around product design (e.g., products not being designed to be disassembled or no take-back in place while it does make sense). Yet, I did see that this topic was marked as a problem in the analysis phase. However, this might be my blind spot… I think it would be good to keep the discussion around this topic going. The ideas that I liked were the ones around education and creating awareness about a circular economy at a young age, for example, by creating a system to share toys. This also linked to the graduation project, Olli Play, of a graduate student (and also one of friends ;-D) from 2017. She wanted to make it easier for children to give away their toys and looked at improving the interaction around the end-of-use.

The “denktankers” of this year did open up some important discussions though. One striking example was their critical note regarding the renovation of the “Binnenhof” in the Hague. This is planned to start in 2020, but not in a circular way (even though there is a lot of talk about promoting circularity and the Netherlands is considered to be a circular economy hub). Thus the students urged the government to put their money were their mouth is. Their idea was centred around urging the government to incorporate circular thinking in their institute. For example, by renovating circularly. The other ideas can be found, here.

Research Progress

Taking all this back to my research has been a lot, but made me feel more competent to deal with both the content and all things surround it. In my quest to define the word competencies I found some helpful articles and theses. Yet, it seems like the lack of consensus in different fields, might lead to me either having to synthesis findings and formulate my own definition or choose to follow a specific definition. However, all these articles have given me a better overview of the field, formed an input to my work, and made me aware of possible limitations to applying concepts and methods used in other fields in my work. In this pre-holiday week I'll be (1) working on an extended abstract for the PLATE conference, (2) extending the design for circular economy framework from my journal paper, and (3) formulating some goals regarding a project on ‘circular economy knowledge and skill building within companies’ that I will be part of.

This was my last blog for 2018. A new blog will follow in January of the new year. For now a very merry X-mass, and a happy and safe new year!

NEW INSIGHTS AND GREEK TEMPLES

It has been 2 weeks, but I’m back with a new blog. In the two weeks I have thought about changing the frequency of blogging to every two weeks instead of every week or so, to make the blogs coincide with my bi-weekly meetings with my supervisors.

First of all the work on differentiating designer roles. Since there is no systematic way to categorise designers in meaningful way, I looked at is from multiple perspectives. Initially I was really enthusiastic about and inspired by both the design expertise model (Lawson and Dorst, 2013) and the categorisation according to function profile (see last post). However, during a meeting with my supervisors I was urged to think further about the applicability of the models in my research.

On one hand, the clustering according to function profiles made sense empirically, but lacked theoretical foundation. On the other hand, the design expertise model works great to explain how designers acquire design expertise by develop certain skills over time, but how would I use it to how product designers acquire circular design expertise? What research techniques could I use to create a similar model to explain how design for circular economy expertise is developed? Observations, interviews, action research? The model proved to have multiple interpretations in the context of my research. Both novice and experienced designers are learning something new when they start working on a circular economy assignment for the frist time. So if the model describes how circular design expertise is acquired, then who would I interview or observe so that I could say something credible about circular design expertise? And where how does this contribute to the main research question (as it stands for now): Which competencies should product designers acquire in the area of circular product design in order to contribute to circular solutions.

A few hours of confusion and a bit frustration followed (did I just waste 2 weeks?!). I reviewed the work that I did and asked myself whether it was “that” important to include a clustering of designers in my research. Couldn’t I instead use the work that I did on clustering of designers in my interviewee selection strategy and data analysis. I assume that designers with a high level of expertise in practice (e.g., expert, master or visionary) are better equipped to foresee which challenges design for a circular economy might post, reflect on their experiences in developing circular solutions and infer which competencies product designers would need. In addition, it would be good to keep in mind how the function profile, caused by the context the product designer operates in, might result in different challenges.

Second of all, I dove into the world of competencies to (1) find out what definitions are floating around in the educational and other domains, and (2) to enrich my knowledge about sustainable and circular competencies. This will help me clarify what I want to get from the interviews, aid in finding empirical foundation for the theoretical framework and help me categorise the interview data in a later stage.

Initial findings of this endeavour are:

In the educational domain, as Wiek et al. (2011, p.204) there is ‘a great deal of terminological ambiguity’ and the domain associates ‘the term ‘‘competencies’’ with skills, abilities, capabilities, capacities, qualifications and other concepts’. Luckily, I also got some suggestions regarding work that is done around inter alia defining “competencies” (e.g., Roe, Mulder, Niishi and Mol). I mainly looked at the work of Roe (2002), who in the psychology domain visualised how competencies are connected to other constructs such as knowledge skills, and abilities (see image) and different ways to extract them.

This strengthened the focus of my research: I aim to create a competency profile for the specialisation of circular product design (within the full domain of product design). It also inspired me to look at other ways of deriving competencies. While I mainly wanted to do interviews with expert designers from practice who are developing circular solutions, the article inspired me to look at other sources such as circular design curricula/courses. Roe (2002) urges to use both an output (e.g., interviews with a designers) and and an input model (i.e., analysing curricular) to come up with a coherent competency profile. HOWEVER (yes in caps), the main concern that I have about this work is that it emerged in another domain. So, in the coming weeks I will read more about the concerns of applying the proposed methodology and its applicability to the design domain.