Today, Craig and Zhiyuan ran a seminar on Circular Design. I was really looking forward to see what the guys had prepared as I find this concept to be really interesting on a personal level.
Circular design is an ideation for a sustainable future that operates without waste, a future where every product is designed for multiple cycles of use, and manufacturing cycles are carefully aligned so that the output of one process always feeds to another. Traditionally, Designers are part of a linear ‘take-make-dispose’ economy, creating products from raw materials that would eventually end up in a landfill after they had been used. A new system that implements a circular design would combat this issue, as the products and materials could be reused in closed loops. This way, we can create a healthy economy that is inspired by and in balance with nature.
During the workshop, we delved into an activity that was created by the people at IDEO, in order to encourage corporate leaders to interconnect their business models. IDEO have been at the forefront of the trying to bring the transition to a circular economy into the mainstream.
For this activity, we split into groups of four, each person in the group were to imagine themselves as a company representative, this company could have been made up on the spot or taken from the real world.
Once we had chosen our companies, each representative had to pinpoint their companies assets and what they waste. The representatives would then collaborate with one another, finding ways for their companies to interconnect and create a new system that might make use of one or of the companies wasted materials, transforming them into useful assets for what may be seen as a sub-company.
The four companies represented in ur group were Uber, Microsoft, X Film (Video Creators) and EditFX Studios (Video Editors). The challenge facing the group was feedback loops (How might we make use of each other data to create new service offerings that improve the circularity of materials?’) As we had quite a diverse set of companies, in terms of size and assets, there was an interesting opportunity for collaboration.
What we came up with was a new educational system that allowed Uber partners to up skill in their downtime. This made use of the time that Uber partners spent without receiving a trip, the training video making skills of X Film, the spare equipment that EditFX Studios had at their disposal and the partners could develop skills and earn Microsoft accredited certificates. Their is not usually a shortage of Uber partners in signing to their platform, this system could allow their partners to develop their career in the path that they want, moving on to better things. The success of certain partners could then lead to more people wanting to partner with Uber in future, but not just for the means of making money.
Overall, I really enjoyed this seminar, it must have been quite daunting for Craig and Zhiyuan as they were first up out of the class, especially given that they were a person shorter than other groups. The pressure didn’t seem to effect them at all though as everything went off without a hitch, they even acted as participants during the workshop whist being facilitators.
Sean Fogarty 