The inevitable transition from a take-make-waste society to a circular economy presents exciting and rewarding challenges for designers, writes Sarah Housley.

It's getting harder for designers to sleep at night. As global warming starts to continuously exceed 1.5 degrees celsius, the industries that promote and enable consumerism ? including advertising and marketing, but also design ? face a clear choice: to radically reorient, or continue to be complicit in the triple planetary crisis.
Design as we know it is doomed, but that's a good thing for designers. The job of making things has to change. Designers, as the problem-solvers (and question-askers) we are known to be, have a brilliant chance to design the changed systems we urgently need. Designing beyond the new can be empowering, exciting, and ultimately extremely rewarding
Increasingly, design will start not with the new, but with redesign and reuse, and its goal will be enabling and rewarding positive behavioural change, as opposed to selling a new product. This might feel scary, because it marks a major shift from how many designers were taught their craft and how they have worked previously.
The blank canvas is famously the starting point for creativity, and raw materials still tend to be the starting point for prototyping and design development, rather than used or salvaged materials. Circular systems are challenging to work with; reprocessed materials can be inconsistent in quality, supply and behaviour.
But des...