Designing in circles- the nani project

Nani began as an exploration of waste, but the more I worked on it, the more it became a question about responsibility. As designers, we spend much of our time thinking about how something should look, feel and function. We think about the person who will use it, the material we will make it from and the story we want it to tell. But there is another question that is just as important: what happens to it when that story is over?

Every object we design enters a larger system. Materials are extracted, processed, transported and assembled into products before eventually becoming someone else's problem, or, ideally, becoming the material for something else. For a long time, much of design has been organised around a linear model: take, make, use and discard. The consequences of that model are increasingly difficult to ignore.

Nani sits within my attempt to understand what design could look like when we begin to think in circles instead.

Circular design challenges the idea that a product has a single beginning and a single end. Instead, materials are kept in use for as long as possible, and products are designed with their future lives in mind. Waste is not treated as an inevitable consequence of making, but as a design problem that can potentially be addressed at every stage of the process.

This way of thinking connects closely with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production. The goal calls for more sustainable patterns of production and consumption, including reducing waste and making more efficient use of natural resources. For designers, this raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: if we have a role in determining what gets produced and from what, how much responsibility do we have for what happens afterwards?

I think the answer is quite a lot.

Designers influence material choices, manufacturing processes, quantities, packaging, repairability and, increasingly, the stories we tell people about what they need to buy. Design can encourage consumption, but it can also challenge it. It can make something disposable or durable, difficult to repair or easy to maintain, destined for a landfill or capable of entering another material cycle.

This is where Nani became particularly interesting to me. Rather than beginning with a new material and asking what could be made from it, the project began with materials that had already entered the world. Textile scraps and discarded fabrics were collected and transformed, while Nani 1.0 also incorporated polybags that had become unusable following changes to regulations around the permissible thickness of plastic bags.

The polybags were particularly important because they demonstrated how quickly a material can move from being a product to being waste. The bags had been manufactured, distributed and used, but a change in regulation meant that existing bags below the required micron thickness could no longer be used. We sourced some of these discarded polybags from a local hospital and experimented with incorporating them into yarn.

The intention was not to suggest that plastic is suddenly a sustainable material. Rather, it was an exercise in extending the life of a material that already existed. Instead of producing another material to replace it, we asked whether its existing material value could be retained and redirected into something new.

This distinction is important to me. Circular design is not simply about using recycled materials and calling a product sustainable. It requires us to look at the entire journey of a material. Where did it come from? How much energy and resource went into producing it? How long will it remain useful? Can it be repaired? Can its components be separated? What happens when the user no longer wants it? And perhaps most importantly, who is responsible for answering these questions?

There is a temptation to place the entire burden of sustainable consumption on the individual. We are encouraged to buy better, recycle more, carry reusable bags and make conscious choices. These actions matter, but they cannot exist in isolation from the systems in which products are designed and manufactured. A consumer cannot recycle a material that was never designed to be recyclable. They cannot repair something that was designed to be disposable. They cannot make an informed choice about a material when its origins and environmental impact are hidden from them.

This is why responsibility in design cannot end when an object leaves the designer's hands.

For me, responsible design is not about achieving perfection. It is about becoming more conscious of consequences. It means questioning whether something needs to be produced at all, considering what materials are already available, reducing unnecessary waste and thinking beyond the first use of an object. It also means acknowledging the limitations of our choices rather than attaching a blanket claim of "sustainability" to anything made from discarded materials.

Nani taught me that circularity can also be deeply connected to craft. Many traditional craft practices inherently understand the value of keeping materials in circulation. Repair, reuse, adaptation and transformation are not new ideas. They have existed within households and communities for generations, often because materials were precious and resources were limited.

What is interesting today is the possibility of bringing that knowledge into contemporary design systems. Craft can slow us down enough to understand a material before deciding what it should become. It can make waste visible. It can turn a discarded material into something that demands attention rather than disappearing into a bin.

This also changes the role of the designer. Instead of being someone who simply creates new things, the designer can become someone who connects existing resources, knowledge, people and possibilities. Designing does not necessarily have to mean adding more objects to the world. Sometimes, it can mean finding ways to keep the objects and materials already here in use for longer.

That is perhaps the larger idea behind Nani. It is not a solution to the problem of waste, nor does one project have the ability to make a material system circular on its own. Instead, it is a small investigation into what happens when we change the starting point of design.

We can begin with what we already have. We can design with the material's history rather than erasing it. We can consider the life of an object beyond its first owner. And we can ask not only "What can I make?", but also "What am I responsible for once I make it?"

For me, that is where circular design begins; not with a perfect product, but with a different way of thinking about our role as designers.

Nani is one small attempt to think in circles.