Mariana Pedrosa

Project Circular Opendesk

This project is a collaboration between Andrea Fischer & Mariana Pedrosa (MA Service Design), and opendesk.cc

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Project Circular Opendesk explores the application of Circular Economy principles to the innovative open source furniture company Opendesk. 

In a world were 80 per cent of the products we possess are thrown away in the first six months of their life, and and era in which we would need 1.6 planet Earths to provide the resources and absorb the waste we create, there is a big opportunity and responsibility for design and designers to think about how products and services are designed.

The framework of the Circular Economy advocates for 'the superior design of materials, products, systems, and within this, business models'.

This is the starting point for our project, and together with Opendesk we have designed three key interventions that will help Opendesk become more 'circular':

• Design for product attachment: each Opendesk product will be tagged with a unique code, which links to a provenance platform. Here users can “own” their product: they can see everything from where the plywood comes from, who designed it, who made it, and even who owned int previously. 
  
• Design for longevity: Care & Aftercare services, which help owners of Opendesk products take better care of them to keep them in a good state for longer, as well as help users who do the furniture by themselves achieve the perfect quality.
  
• Design for re-use: through OpenMarket, Opendesk takes responsibility for what it creates and hosts a pre-loved platform for their own products with a quality guarantee for assurance. 
  

These interventions have been prototyped and we are thrilled that our project is going live. Check out an example of the provenance platform at www.opendesk.cc

Read more about here.

Twitter @CircularGirls