Abstract:

Despite the many actions promoting change towards a new circular economic model, most notably the European Commission’s Action Plan for the Circular Economy (CE) updated in 2019 (EC, 2019), ongoing research has identified a lack of clear and accessible material regarding the CE for design educators.

This paper proposes a possible means of working with this problem by means of visualization tools (Rijo, 2020) that help the student to understand the context of CE. A Circular Visualization Challenge was employed to visualize complex, varied, and ever-changing data on the theme for second-year design degree students (using analogical and digital tools). Composed of three phases: Introduction (various Word Clouds, testing of a sustainable app/web), Context (Sustainable Issue Mapping workshop), Research (desktop research: historical map, create definitions, identify milestones, document methodologies, showcase projects + Circular Strategies workshop). Culminating in the self-initiated Final Project, where each student creates their own brief. One of the main factors being that students were from various design areas; graphics, product and interiors.

The role of collective digital tools in education where teachers function as “guides [rather] than as repositories of knowledge” (Damarin, 1998) is creating new trends that allow the student to personalize their learning process by applying adaptive learning and co-design –understood here as the collective creativity in design (Sandersa & Stappers, 2008)– methodologies in order to visualize and simplify complex sustainable data by sharing insights and inputs that are updated, validated and visualized in an agile manner.

The results permit an evolutionary change which in turn facilitates building upon existing sources to create open-source innovative digital archives for design education where information is presented in a clear and accessible manner. Thus the material generated and the process of visualizing data using digital learning technologies will not only respond to students’ individual needs (Shaffer, Nash & Ruis, 2015) but also enable us to cope with the emerging and ever-changing data required to teach design for the CE.

Keywords:

Design for the Circular Economy, Visualization Tools, Adaptive Learning, Co-design, Open Source Innovative Digital Products.