Exploring How Design Can Contribute to Circular Economy Through Design for X Approaches

Design plays a strategic role for companies in addressing servitization and Circular Economy (CE) paradigms, to deliver either products, or services or Product-Service Systems (PSSs). Design for X (DfX) practices, belonging to concurrent engineering approach, have revealed great effectiveness in enriching products with functionalities as service supportability and circularity. They have been also used to systematize PSSs components along the design process, enabling and easing design knowledge creation and sharing between product and service designers. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the abundance of DfX approaches related with the End of Life (EoL) stage, they still lack of a CE perspective. Therefore, this paper wants to explore how design can contribute to CE through the use of DfX approaches.