Working paper: 'Designing communications for a circular economy: information design and narratives for social change'

The story of the circular economy has sparked growing discussion and innovation amongst businesses, yet the role of the customer remains underexplored and a challenge to the implementation of circular designs and business... [ view full abstract ]

The story of the circular economy has sparked growing discussion and innovation amongst businesses, yet the role of the customer remains underexplored and a challenge to the implementation of circular designs and business models. Customer involvement may require new behaviours such as rental, repair or return (here we propose 7 ‘R’s in the styleof similar ‘re’models), which represent a departure from traditional purchase-based transactions. Although some fields of sustainable design have developed concepts of designfor sustainable behaviour, these have focused on product or service rather than information design, and so-called ‘green’ marketing has had mixed results. The paper reviews some literature from the fields of service marketing and service design, and finds the concepts of the customer journey and ‘touchpoints’useful to describe the enhanced communication and interactions that may be required between organisations and customers in a circular economy. It also Explores literature from the field of information design, and the potential of visual rhetoric and narratives in particular to affect engagement and even behaviour change. Code play and narrative transportation for instance have been shown to constitute persuasive techniques in healthcare communications and in consumers’ adoption of novel products by reducing their resistance to the message. Further development and empirical studies are needed, but current indications are that visual communication can have a significant role to play in engaging customers with the new behaviours required in a circular economy, and this will have important lessons for many organisations.

Keywords: circular economy, information design, service design, visual rhetoric, narrative