Designing for a circular future requires informed choices. IDSA’s Circular Design Resources offer clear, actionable tools to help designers reduce waste, extend product life cycles, and create positive environmental impact. Start exploring and put circular thinking into practice.
The Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Systems Change Lab
The Systems Change Lab maps the interconnected shifts needed across production, consumption, policy and infrastructure, highlighting leverage points such as material flows, business models and user behavior where design can drive systemic impact. It matters because it expands our role beyond individual products, enabling us to influence the larger systems that determine how value is created, used and sustained.
UNEP Circularity Platform
The UNEP Global Circularity Platform translates complex system challenges into clear evidence on the impacts of materials, production and lifecycle decisions. It matters because it makes the consequences of linear systems visible, empowering us to make informed choices and lead more innovative, collaborative and circular solutions across the entirety of the value chain.
Right to Repair
Repair extends the life of products by designing for durability, disassembly, and serviceability from the start. For the design and manufacturing industry, it creates new systems for maintenance, refurbishment, and customer engagement beyond the first sale. It matters because it reduces waste, preserves material value, and shifts production toward more responsible, circular models.
Conceptualizing the Circular Economy: An analysis of 114 definitions
This research brings together over 100 definitions of the circular economy, showing how the concept spans design, business, and systems thinking. For designers and manufacturers, it highlights the need to move beyond a single definition and instead understand circularity as a connected system of material flows, value, and impact. It matters because clarity in language leads to better decisions and more aligned action across industries.
Cradle to Cradle
Cradle to Cradle is a design framework that rethinks products as part of continuous material cycles, where everything is designed to be safely reused, recycled, or returned to the environment. For industrial designers and manufacturers, it shifts the focus from minimizing harm to designing for positive impact through material health, circularity, and clean systems. It matters because it challenges us to design products that give back rather than take away.
Engineering For One Planet
Engineering for One Planet provides principles and tools to help designers and engineers integrate sustainability into everyday design decisions. It supports a shift toward low-impact materials, efficient systems, and lifecycle thinking from the start of product development. It matters because it makes sustainability practical and actionable at the scale where most design decisions are made.
Design for Planet
Design for Planet is a framework that helps designers and manufacturers think more broadly about environmental impact across the full lifecycle of a product or system. It pushes design beyond small improvements and toward regenerative, systems-level thinking that supports both planetary and human health. It matters because design has a critical role in shaping how we make, use, and rethink what comes next.
Design For The Environment Life Cycle Assessments
Life Cycle Assessment is a tool that helps designers and manufacturers understand the environmental impact of a product from raw materials to end of life. It supports better decisions around materials, production, transportation, use, and recovery. It matters because the earlier designers understand impact, the better they can design for real change.
Circular Electronics Design Guide
Circular electronics design is about creating products that last longer, can be repaired, upgraded, and responsibly recovered at end of life. For industrial designers and manufacturers, it means moving away from sealed, disposable devices and toward systems that support longevity and material recovery. It matters because electronics are one of the fastest-growing waste streams, and early design decisions shape their impact from the start.