Maaike Weber, Jotte de Koning, and Ruud Balkenende
Substances of Concern (SoC) in products pose large-scale systemic risks, which intensify in a circular economy. Each product or resource cycle introduces new, unforeseen, and potentially accumulative risks. Previous studies identify design strategies to avoid, reduce, and control the effects of SoC in products, with control strategies enabling designers to maintain or regain control over products or their parts to prevent SoC emissions or exposures at any life-cycle stage. To explore how designers might contribute to this area of sustainability, we examine existing control strategies in the broadest sense, focusing specifically on circular product-service systems (PSS) due to their repeated exposure cycles and shifting responsibilities across the value chain. PSS are intentionally designed with controlled business models that decouple value creation from the delivered physical product.
This paper reflects on first insights from ongoing research into the entanglement of embodied and material design with systemic effects, drawing on systemic and transition design expertise. Preliminary results suggest that safe and circular product-service systems can enable more control mechanisms than previously identified. The three existing control strategies are reframed for their PSS potential and expanded with four additional strategies, each requiring the design of full PSS with explicit attention to the designer’s initial role and to how design influences value-chain roles throughout the lifecycle. The discussion highlights emerging research trajectories, including the extent to which regulation should incentivize strategies that control the number of products introduced—such as through expanded assessments of essentiality—and how non-paternalistic care distribution fostering collaboration across overlapping value chains could be enabled.
Keywords: Substances of concern; chemical safety; novel entities; circular design; product-service design; embodiment design; systemic design; responsibility