Eco-design Strategy Wheel

(Image above from Circular economy and Sustainability 2002, Chapter 12)

The Eco-design Strategy wheel is a tool that helps you consider all stages in a product’s lifecycle, suggesting sustainable design strategies at each stage. It can also be used to qualitatively assess impacts across a product’s lifecycle.  It is a sustainable design approach with the explicit goal of minimizing the environmental impact of existing and newly developed products along their entire life cycle.

Usage

The eco-design strategy wheel presents eight strategies along the spokes of the wheel, following the lifecycle stages of the product. To use it as an ideation tool, simply brainstorm based on the lifecycle strategy you are focusing on (e.g., “low-impact materials”), especially brainstorming the sub-strategies (e.g., responsibly sourced, recycled and recyclable, and safe). To help choose what lifecycle stage to focus on, you may also use the wheel to qualitatively guess your priorities by assigning a score to each strategy. The better a product meets the strategy (or list of sub-strategies), the higher the score, with the best scores marked on the outer ring of the wheel and the worst scores close to the center. As all scores are based on educated guesses, and are not calculated, the strategy wheel cannot be used to determine the actual ecological impact of a product. Each strategy includes a list of sub-strategies. A product doesn’t have to use all of these to get a positive score. Also, if a strategy is not applicable, you can skip it.

Benefits

  • Suggests a thorough list of sustainable design strategies across all life cycle stages, and encourages innovative thinking.
  • Simple–easy to brainstorm on, easy to read its assessment.
  • It can help you compare two product design scenarios, and/or compare a product before and after redesign to qualitatively rate the improvement.
  • Its qualitative metrics are much faster and easier than LCA (though limited).

Limitations/Risks

  • Since it displays impacts qualitatively and displays different impacts on the same scale, you can’t see which impacts in which life cycle stages are more important or less important.
  • Assessments generally confirm your preconceived biases, because it lacks quantitative or empirical data. 
  • Because its assessments are not quantitative or empirical, you need to use your own judgement about which strategies are important and effective.
  • The wheel has a bias towards environmental sustainability. It hardly considers business or social sustainability. If you want to work with these as well, you need to use different tools, for instance the SDG compass (GRI et al., 2015). 

Exercises

Resources