Addressing circular economy through design for X approaches: A systematic literature review

Abstract

Guided by a technological revolution, widely discussed paradigms as servitization and Circular Economy (CE) are progressively pushing manufacturers towards delivering increasingly complex solutions. Design plays a strategic role in this sense, either considering products, services or Product-Service Systems (PSSs). Concurrent engineering and, specifically, Design for X (DfX) approaches have been widely associated to products, revealing great potentialities for enhancing service functionalities like supportability and circularity. Again, DfX approaches have been already exploited to systematically support the PSS design process, given their re-known ability to allow a better information sharing between product designers and service managers. However, even if several DfX approaches related with the End of Life (EoL) stage already exist (e.g. Design for recycling, remanufacturing and EoL), they still need to better fit with a circular design perspective. Therefore, the aim of this paper is exploring and understanding how design can contribute towards a CE transition through the adoption of DfX approaches.