Design for the circular future of living
Thomas Schnur is a product and interior designer and teaches at the ecosign design academy in Cologne. He is always on the lookout for materials with which he can take furniture and everyday objects a step further. In this blog, he talks about what design of such objects has to do with the circular economy.
Dear Mr. Schnur, circular economy and product design go hand in hand – would you approve?
A core challenge of the circular economy is that products today often contain a large number of materials that cannot be separated by type at the end of their life. Most furniture and products, for example, contain fabrics, perhaps foams, metals, various plastics, even wood with various adhesives and additives. The list goes on and on.
So if we are serious about the circular economy, the choice of materials and recyclability of products must be taken into account right from the design stage. Circular economy is therefore not possible without well-thought-out design. Due to these changing requirements for materials, the versatility of a material is a decisive factor. Plastics, for example, have great prerequisites for promoting closed material cycles due to their different material properties.
You yourself design furniture and everyday objects. What does such a "design for circular economy" mean for the future from your point of view? What do we have to be prepared for in our living room, for example?
By choosing the right materials and their connections, we can meet the demand for more conscious and sustainable materials.
In terms of shapes and forms, we won't notice any change if we don't want to. With modern materials and new manufacturing technologies, furniture can be created in any form. We can let the familiar remain familiar – or just think it in a completely new way.
A good example of this is a chair that I recently designed with Covestro and Arcesso Dynamics: The seat shell is made of a material that was seamlessly produced in one piece using a special process – Arfinio®. The result is a very sculptural and versatile piece of seating furniture, which can be easily dismantled and whose individual parts would be fully recyclable due to their mono-materiality.
What needs to happen for the vision of circular living environments of the future to become a reality?
Recycling and take-back systems need to be further optimized so that the materials can enter cycles at all. In addition, there is a need for awareness of the relevance of design and materials. And it needs people with such awareness in the right places in companies, design offices, universities. We have to reach out to such people and actively search and find like-minded people – because only such interactions and collective intelligence can lead to a breakthrough for change.