How Don Norman's Circular Design framework applies to sustainable UX and digital product design

In Design for a Better World (2023), Don Norman, the person who coined the term "User Experience", dedicates an entire part to sustainability. At its center is a framework he calls circular design: a set of principles that redefine what design is responsible for.

The age of waste is a UX and design problem

The twentieth century was the age of waste. Not by accident, by design.

The Industrial Revolution, starting in the 1700s in England, created factories capable of mass-producing goods at low cost. Two hundred years later, at the end of World War II, the economic recovery of war-ravaged nations was built on one principle: continuous consumer spending. Marketing professionals started calling people "consumers" because that was their role in the system: to consume, again and again and again.

The numbers tell the rest of the story:

• The materials used in disposable products take 20 to 500 years to biodegrade.
• More than 1 million plant and animal species are now threatened with extinction.
• The world still gets more than 84% of its energy from fossil fuels.
• Even the most optimistic predictions say the transition to renewables won't be complete until 2050.
• The ecological harm has been compounding for nearly 300 years, since the start of the Industrial Revolution.

Three types of planned obsolescence in product design

Products don't become obsolete by chance. Three deliberate strategies ensure they are replaced rather than kept.

Breakdown: Components are so tightly integrated that they cannot be extracted economically. Repairing one part risks damaging adjacent ones. It's cheaper to discard the entire product than to fix it. This is not a failure of manufacturing, it's a choice made during design.

Progress: Refrigerators used to last decades. Today they're controlled by chips and electronic displays that feel outdated in a few years. Phone makers, car manufacturers, and software companies release new models with new standards, new protocols, new OS requirements... making old products incompatible, unmaintainable, and unupgradable. The product still works. The ecosystem around it has been deliberately changed.

Fashion: The appearance of products is changed so the old looks undesirable. The auto industry perfected this: minor yearly updates, major body redesigns every few years. Consumer electronics amplified it. The actual changes in products are often insignificant, but the marketing makes consumers believe they cannot live without them.

These are not market forces. They are design decisions. Someone chose the materials that can't be separated. Someone decided the battery shouldn't be replaceable. Someone scheduled the annual redesign.

The Take-Make-Waste model and why it Is a design flaw

The current manufacturing model is a linear chain:

Extract raw materials (devastating local ecosystems) → Process them into components (discarding unusable material as waste) → Manufacture products (consuming enormous energy) → Sell → Use briefly → Discard.

Waste doesn't happen only at the end. It accompanies every stage:

• Half of all waste is produced before the product is even manufactured: in mining, refining, and transportation.
• Product designs make repair difficult or impossible: batteries in laptops, screens in phones, leading to premature obsolescence.
• Factories powered by electricity appear clean, but the pollution happens at the power station where that electricity was generated, often far away, out of sight of the consumer.

Waste is not an unfortunate by-product of manufacturing. It is a design flaw. The linear chain was designed without considering what happens after the product leaves the store.

What the Circular Economy means for designers

Nature has almost no waste.

Animals and plants gather nutrients from the soil, water, and the sun. When they die, decomposition returns all substances to the earth, food for other organisms, fertilizer for plants, building materials for nests. The output of one system is the input of another.

The circular economy, a framework championed by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, applies this principle to human-made products. The goal: design out waste and pollution by making objects repairable, upgradable, and reusable.

Two cycles operate depending on the material:

• Biological materials: Components are renewed, repaired, reused, and eventually decomposed through biochemical processes to produce useful materials or energy.
• Non-renewable materials (metals, plastics, minerals): The product is kept in the economy as long as possible through maintenance, repair and reuse, minimizing the need for new mining and manufacturing.

The 3 principles of Circular Design

The circular economy is a philosophy. Circular design is how it gets implemented. The critical point of intervention is the design process: where materials are selected, where repairability is built in (or not), and where the end-of-life path is determined.

1. Minimize waste and pollution : Waste and pollution are design flaws, not inevitable by-products. This starts at material selection: choosing components that don't require harmful extraction, don't produce toxic by-products during manufacturing, and don't contaminate the environment when discarded.
2. Keep products in use as long as possible: Products, or their parts, must be designed to be reused, repaired, or remanufactured.This means:

• Designing for disassembly: making it possible to replace a failed component without destroying the rest.
• Stopping material bonding that prevents separation. Coffee cups and juice cartons are made of paper with a plastic waterproof lining. The paper and plastic cannot be separated. The entire product is discarded as waste, even though each material individually could be reused.
• Exploring alternatives. Reusable pouches inside recyclable containers. Bottles with paper outer shells, recyclable and lighter than glass. Experimental plastics made from seaweed that are easily compostable.

1. Regenerate natural systems: Nature minimizes waste because the remains and excretions of one organism are put to use by others: scavenger animals, detritus feeders, decomposing organisms. Design should aspire to the same: products whose end-of-life materials enrich rather than degrade the systems they return to.

The design process doesn't end when the product ships. It extends through the product's entire lifecycle: use, repair, degradation, and the eventual return of materials.

Why recycling alone cannot solve the waste problem

Recycling sounds like it solves the problem. It doesn't... at least not alone.

The promise is misleading: What "can be recycled" actually means: it is theoretically possible if the recycling facility has the correct equipment, if the material isn't contaminated, and if bonded materials can be separated. The recycling triangle with the small numeral on plastic items is functionally meaningless, even experts can't say whether a given local plant can handle that type.

The material degrades: Recycled paper and plastics are almost never as good as the original "virgin" material. After two or three cycles, they must be discarded entirely. Only glass and metals can be recycled indefinitely.

The better answer: Design and manufacture in ways that eliminate the need to recycle.Direct reuse is better than recycling.Eliminating the waste that needs recycling is better still.

Applying Circular Design to UX and digital product design

The framework is built around physical products. But the principles of circular design translate directly to digital.

Digital obsolescence is designed, too. When an app drops support for an older OS, when a SaaS product sunsets a feature to push users toward a pricier tier, when a redesign invalidates learned workflows. These are obsolescence through progress. The product still works. The ecosystem around it was deliberately changed.

Digital waste is real. Every unnecessary feature, every autoplay video, every bloated JavaScript bundle, every tracking script loaded on every page. These consume compute, bandwidth, energy, and attention. The digital take-make-waste model: build features → ship them → let them accumulate until the product is slow and unsustainable → redesign from scratch.

Designing for longevity matters in digital, too. A component system that can be maintained and extended without rebuilding everything is the digital equivalent of a product designed for disassembly. A design system that allows incremental updates without forcing users to relearn the interface is the digital equivalent of a repairable product. A monolithic interface that can only be changed by replacing everything is a glued-together coffee cup.

Thinking in systems is a UX skill. The air conditioner example is a lesson in second-order effects. UX designers make decisions daily whose second-order effects they never measure:

• The notification that increases engagement but increases anxiety.
• The infinite scroll that increases time-on-site but increases regret.
• The frictionless checkout that increases conversion but increases overconsumption.

Circular design asks designers to consider the full lifecycle of the experience — not just the moment of interaction, but what comes after.

It is the designer's responsibility to make a system's operations intelligible. Companies hide system state assuming transparency confuses people. In fact, the absence of coherent information is what confuses them. Good communication design makes complex systems understandable, but only if the designer acknowledges the system's full scope first.

Resources

Design for a Better World by Don Norman (2023), the full book, of which this article covers Part III

Ellen MacArthur Foundation: Circular Economy Diagram: the "butterfly diagram" referenced in the book

The Waste Makers by Vance Packard (1960): the foundational text on planned obsolescence

The Design of Everyday Things by Don Norman, his foundational work on human-centered design