Reimagining Design: Europe’s Circular Opportunity for Industry, Community & Future Living
Europe stands at a pivotal point in redefining how we live, design, and create value. As the pressures of climate breakdown, resource scarcity, and shifting economic paradigms converge, the future of industrial design must be more than aesthetic or functional. It must be systemic.
At the Circular Design Clinic 2025, we’re challenging the foundational assumptions of product development. And it starts with one critical question: What does a European way of living – and designing – look like?
Circularity Is More Than a Loop. It’s a Language for the Future.
Rachel Armstrong, ZAP Professor of Design-Driven Construction for Regenerative Architecture at KU Leuven, Belgium, is a pioneer in regenerative architecture. She said: “Nature has no trillionaires.” Instead, nature thrives on flows, cycles, and symbiosis. Her vision of “circular homes” that process their own waste and generate energy is not a utopian dream – it’s a radical call for a bottom-up, bio-integrated design culture.
But to get there, industrial design must evolve. Not just toward biodegradable materials or modular reuse, but into a multidimensional practice that includes:
- Data-rich Design: Understanding how products are used, updated, and repurposed across multiple life cycles and user types.
- Business Model Transformation: From Linear Sales to Service Ecosystems, Performance-Based Revenue, and Platform Thinking.
- Extended User Narratives: Products no longer live with a single owner. They travel, adapt, and get upgraded. Design must follow this flow.
Our Legacy Can’t Be Our Limitation
Europe’s industrial legacy is heavy – concrete, steel, glass. These materials built the modern world. But they also imposed constraints on imagination. As Armstrong suggests, we cannot simply “substitute” new materials into old building types. We need new paradigms of purpose and scale.
This is true beyond architecture. Products and services need circular architecture – business architectures that consider maintenance, redeployment, second and third uses, and end-of-use reintegration. We must think about design as lifecycle infrastructure, not as static output.
Design as Diplomacy: Europe’s Chance to Lead Differently
In contrast to Silicon Valley’s speed-first model or China’s scale-first ambitions, Europe has a different responsibility: to create quality of life through community, culture, and ecological coherence. Not the richest. The most resilient. Not the biggest. The most livable.
Circular design is not just a technical tool. It’s a cultural statement. It says: We invest in relationships, not disposables. We regenerate, not extract. We share prosperity, not hoard it.
Michael Leitl, Executive Director
Armstrong speaks of a Europe “that is the best place on Earth to live.” That starts with empowering SMEs, fostering bottom-up innovation, and restoring the commons – shared ideas, shared materials, shared infrastructures.
Circular design is not just a technical tool. It’s a cultural statement. It says: We invest in relationships, not disposables. We regenerate, not extract. We share prosperity, not hoard it.
From Clinic to Culture
This November, at the Circular Design Clinic 2025 in Frankfurt, we are inviting 30 professionals, from product designers to sustainability leads, to put theory into action. With real products, real tools, and real outcomes.
Because the design imagination Europe needs won’t be born in labs alone. It will rise from collaboration, iteration, and the boldness to ask: What if our products worked like ecosystems? What if business flowed like water? What if design healed, not just served?
Michael Leitl
Circular Strategies
Business Model Development
AI Concepting
