Vitra: Bringing Circular Thinking Into Product Development
How do you design a product without relying on new raw materials? How do you make it last longer, easier to repair and more likely to remain useful over time? These questions are often framed as sustainability challenges, but in practice they are product development challenges. They influence materials, manufacturing, architecture, supply chains, business models and user behaviour, which means they need to be considered while the product is still taking shape rather than added once the important decisions have already been made.
This is what makes circularity both difficult and valuable. It forces teams to think beyond the object itself and consider the wider system around it. A decision about repairability, for example, immediately raises other questions: who will carry out the repair, where replacement parts will come from, how long they will remain available, whether the product can be disassembled without damage and whether the economics of repair make sense in the first place. What appears to be a design decision quickly becomes a manufacturing, logistics, service and business model question.
The important decisions happen earlier than we think
The earlier those relationships become visible, the more room there is to act on them. Once a product moves further into development, many of its characteristics become harder and more expensive to change. Materials have been specified, architectures have been fixed, manufacturing decisions have been made and commercial assumptions are already shaping the proposition. At that point, circularity risks becoming an optimisation exercise rather than a genuine design opportunity.
“Sustainability is an important part of Vitra’s corporate strategy. The longevity and the choice of our materials have always been the focus of product development at Vitra. With the program, we want to sensitize the team even more to the topic and develop the innovators of the future.”
— Michael Leisinger, Vitra
A more useful approach is to bring those realities into the process earlier. That means looking at environmental, technical and commercial consequences at the same time and giving teams the tools to understand the trade-offs before they become locked in.
We saw the value of this while working with teams at Vitra. Sustainability was not a new topic for the company. Longevity, material choice and responsible manufacturing had already been part of Vitra’s approach to product development for years. The challenge was therefore not to convince people that circularity matters, but to help teams translate circular principles into practical decisions they could use in their everyday work.
From circular principles to practical decisions
To do that, we developed a learning programme that combined theory, practical exercises and direct application. Participants explored circular strategies, product value maps, material flows, stakeholder relationships, lifecycle implications and business models, but the objective was never simply to teach a set of tools. The real value emerged when those tools were applied to concrete product challenges and teams started to see how one decision could create consequences elsewhere in the system.
That distinction matters because circularity often appears deceptively simple at the level of principle. Designing for repair, extending product life, reducing virgin material use or creating take-back systems all sound straightforward until a team has to decide exactly how they will work in practice. A modular product might be easier to repair, for example, but could also increase manufacturing complexity. A reuse model may reduce material demand while introducing new logistical costs. A material with a lower environmental impact in one area may perform differently when durability, sourcing, processing or end-of-life options are considered.
These are not contradictions to be eliminated; they are the reality of product development. The role of circular thinking is not to provide a perfect answer, but to help teams understand the consequences of different choices more clearly and earlier.
Learning by doing changes the quality of the questions
This is also why learning by doing is so important. Knowing the principles of circular economy is different from being able to use them when making product decisions under real constraints. In the Vitra programme, participants first built a shared understanding of the core concepts, then applied them to practical exercises and finally used them while developing their own ideas. That progression allowed the difficult questions to emerge naturally, because theory was continuously tested against real-world considerations.
The structure was simple: participants first listened and built their knowledge, then practised by applying what they had learned to concrete examples, and finally used those principles in their own development work with regular coaching and expert input. Across the programme, that meant 245 minutes of theory, 16 hours of workshops and 60 hours of coaching.
The numbers are useful, but the most valuable part happened between them: when assumptions were challenged, when a promising concept exposed a problem elsewhere in the system, or when a team had to decide between two imperfect options. This is where knowledge becomes judgement.
A circular product needs a viable system around it
Over time, the conversation moved beyond individual products and towards the systems that support them. A circular product cannot succeed through materials or design alone. The business model has to work, manufacturing has to remain viable, customers have to see value in the proposition and partners across the value chain need a reason to participate. Environmental ambition therefore has to be considered alongside technical feasibility and commercial reality.
This is where a broader, whole-system view becomes useful. Rather than asking only how a product can be made more sustainable, teams can ask what needs to change around the product for a different outcome to become possible. Sometimes the answer lies in material choice or construction. In other cases it may involve repair services, take-back systems, new ownership models, manufacturing partnerships or a different relationship between the company and the customer.
The tools used throughout the programme supported this wider view. Circular Business Canvases, Material Flow Maps and Design Life Cycle Analysis helped teams understand where value moved through the system and where different choices created new consequences. Prototyping tools such as the Sustainability Finance Prototype and Streamlined Life Cycle Analysis also allowed concepts to be considered from both an ecological and economic perspective while they were still being developed.
Thinking in this way changes the quality of the decisions teams can make. It shifts the conversation from isolated improvements to connected consequences and makes it easier to identify where the most meaningful opportunities actually sit.
Knowledge can explain what a circular business model is; judgement helps determine whether it makes sense for a particular product, market and customer. Knowledge can tell us that products should last longer; judgement helps define what longevity should mean in practice and what changes are required to make it possible.
Circularity is ultimately about better judgement
For us, that is one of the most important lessons from working on circular product development. The challenge is not simply a lack of knowledge. In many organisations, the principles are already understood. The harder task is building the judgement required to apply them in context.
Circularity, then, should not be treated as a separate layer within product development. It is a way of improving the product development process itself. By bringing more of the future reality into the room at the beginning, teams gain a clearer view of what will actually work, what will need to change and where the strongest opportunities lie.
The goal is not simply to make an existing product more sustainable. It is to make better decisions sooner, so that better products and better systems can emerge from the start.
