Note: This article was originally published as a guest contribution in Circular Economy on March 30, 2026.
The debate around the Circular Economy often revolves around materials, recycling rates, and regulation —and thereby starts in the wrong place. What’s decisive is the design process. Yet since the Bauhaus, Germany’s last major design movement, design has been systematically underestimated in this country — not understood as a strategic instrument, but reduced to aesthetics and form.
Design acts as a systemic lever when it orients itself around two boundaries: planetary boundaries and real customer needs. Neither can be “stuck onto a product” after the fact. Both must be thought through, tested, and translated early on.
Design determines material choice and production method
Products are the consequence of many small and large decisions: which materials are used, and how are they joined? But also: how long does a product last, how is it repaired, passed on, or recovered? Research in the field of Sustainable Design has shown for years that up to 80 percent of a product’s environmental impact is determined in the design phase. Why? Because design dictates material choice, production method, and by extension, production location.
This frequently cited figure can be observed clearly in practice during the shift from linear to circular: a stationery manufacturer aiming to increase the use of recycled plastic across its entire product portfolio must partially redesign its products from the ground up. The reason: recyclates behave differently from virgin materials. Even small changes to the mould lead to a noticeably different product experience. With a fountain pen, a millimetre more or less determines whether it sits ergonomically in the hand or not.
The ESPR forces companies to structurally change their products
The consequence? Some iconic designs likely cannot be produced from recyclates and will have to be abandoned. Others can only be continued through close collaboration between design, toolmaking, and material development. This example shows why simple material substitution doesn’t always work — and why design sits at the decisive lever.
With the new EU regulation Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), product design is now also moving to the centre of the regulatory landscape. Durability, repairability, disassembly capability, material transparency, and digital product passports are becoming mandatory for many product categories. Crucially, the ESPR goes far beyond its predecessor, which improved the energy efficiency of electronic products, and forces companies to structurally change their products.
Standards such as the DIN 4555x series serve as a methodological bridge. They provide a framework for systematically integrating circularity requirements into the design process. But anyone who reads these standards merely as a compliance checklist misses their real potential. Because innovation happens precisely where companies treat the legal minimum as a starting point, not a destination.
Companies should embark on an open innovation journey
A vivid example comes from Swiss manufacturer FREITAG. With the decision to develop a backpack made entirely from mono-materials, the result was not just a new product but ultimately a new north star for the industry. Even simple models often consist of many components, each made from a different material. This high level of ambition had practical consequences: new suppliers, intensive R&D with existing partners, new material and joining solutions.
The product is not innovative because it meets guidelines, but because it takes regulatory criteria as a starting point, reformulates them into a near-impossible goal, and then searches for the new solution through an iterative design process. “We can” becomes “How might we” — and with it, an open innovation journey.
Design is a process under uncertain conditions
Such processes don’t happen by accident — they need structure. One proven approach is the Double Diamond model from Design Thinking. In the first step, the problem space is opened up: where does the existing product fail from the user’s perspective? Where do hotspots emerge — both ecological, in the form of material waste, emissions, or pollution, and economic, in the form of unnecessary cost or complexity? Only then comes the solution space, where product design teams develop, test, and implement ideas in a targeted way. “Design” here is not the visual result at the end, but the path towards it.
Research on user-centred design — from Don Norman, for instance, or from the orbit of the Ellen MacArthur Foundation — shows: circular products rarely fail due to a lack of technology, but due to a lack of fit with people’s everyday lives. Design can build bridges here, translating planetary boundaries into usable solutions. In doing so, it makes sustainable options not just possible, but attractive.
Anyone who reduces design to colour, shape, and surface misses this potential. Design is a process under uncertain conditions — between ecological requirements, regulatory frameworks, and customer needs — that leads to clear, concrete solutions. In an economy that must reinvent itself within planetary boundaries, that is precisely the decisive lever for innovation.