The circular economy is a transition from the old linear model of extraction and exploitation to a sustainable, regenerative and circular economy by design. The core goals are to eliminate waste, make things last longer, and regenerate nature. To achieve this we need to redesign business models, reimagine consumption and transform our values. The vision and mission of Circular Futures is to expand and activate the circular economy by offering cutting-edge processes of envisaging the innovation, business models and policy landscape that will unlock the potential for a restorative and regenerative Circular Economy.

Can you imagine the circular future you are working towards? By using strategic foresight, you can unlock the blocks and barriers to achieving the impossible. This method takes a systems approach to push beyond the obvious horizon and explore multiple future scenarios. Strategic foresight is best used in situations where uncertainty is high; as an action-oriented approach, it enables multiple future scenarios to be mapped out and pathways to achieving them to be unblocked. Combined with our full toolset, strategic foresight is the foundation for any company, organisation or government transitioning to the circular economy.

A process of envisioning the future now and creating the artefacts, innovations, policies and scenarios in which the envisaged future can become a reality, design futuring draws on breakthrough innovation, scenario building, visioning, systems thinking and backcasting to reverse engineer the process of achieving an imagined future. By creating your ideal versions of the future, you can then establish the tangible pathway to get from the current state to the desired outcome. We integrate this into our workshops to ensure that visionary and boundary-pushing ideas are considered in the mix of viable futures. This is not just for designers or creatives — it's for anyone who has the desire to push past the ordinary and design entirely new outcomes.

Backcasting is a planning method that enables a future scenario to be reverse-engineered to ensure that the key touchpoints are identified and achieved when moving to the desired outcome. Once future scenarios are envisaged and desired outcomes are set, backcasting is used to map the process from the current status quo to achieve the new future. All of the needed actions are identified and a logic for sucess is set. It aligns everyone to the task at hand and ensures that any needed changes to policy, innovation, technology, etc. are identified and invested in.

CoDesign is a well-established process of designing or “co-creating” with the key stakeholders. The stakeholders are often those who will be the beneficiaries of, or directly affected by the outcome of your actions (be it a product, policy, process or service). By including key stakeholders, you are ensuring that the outcomes are connected to the context in which it will exist and ensuring that people are invited rather than instructed to be included. This is connected to participatory action research, and at Circular Futures, we have vast intercultural experience in applying co-design successfully.

Circular systems thinking shifts the way we approach these problems from issues to opportunities because it enables us to see the full picture before the parts, and the relationships that reinforce the problems are identified so that effective interventions can be implemented to shift their status quo. It’s generative, approaching the problem from the positive possibility that all systems hold their own solutions and that by exploring the system that sustains the current status quo, we can unlock the potential to create a new system.