Circular Design Principles: Overcoming Material Barriers

What should designers know about materials before product development? In this episode, Andreas Maegerlein, Head of the Creation Center Europe at BASF, talks about circular design from a material perspective, focusing on how material choices enable or limit circularity. The conversation looks at how product design is affected when materials are developed to last for decades, while products are often designed to be disposable or short-lived. What you’ll hear in this episode: • The importance of aligning material choice with product lifetime and use cycles •Why material selection need to be informed by recycling infrastructure, recycling technologies, and energy-usage • How the role of designers is evolving from showcasing quality alone toward also conveying sustainability This episode opens the series Implementing Circular Design Principles, produced in collaboration with the German Design Council. The series explores how design decisions shape circular outcomes at the material, product, and system level, following the principles of Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.