RVO has granted the project Early-Stage Environmental Decision making for effective circular product designs under Kennis en Innovatie Agenda–Circulaire Economie (KIA-CE) 2022.
In this project, led by Benjamin Sprecher of TU Delft, a postdoctoral researcher will collaborate with TNO, ASML and Action to develop a universally applicable tool to support early-stage decision making for designing circular products.
Circularity and carbon neutrality have been receiving increasing attention within the Dutch economy. Yet, major steppingstones to such a transition are still lacking. One such steppingstone relates to the design of circular and carbon-neutral products: How do we design truly circular and environmentally friendly products?
This project is set up to fill the current knowledge gap for high-quality early-stage assessments and to assist, in the long run, product designers in their early-stage decision making. On the project scale the objective is twofold. First, a set of new and highly circular products for the partners ASML, Action and TNO will be developed collaboratively. In a second step, the lessons learned from these intrinsically different products will be synergised to create a scientifically validated early-stage circular design tool, the Early-Stage Environmental Decisions tool, or ESED tool in short. It will be a universally and industrially applicable tool which matches the design process and the information available at each stage of the design process – a steady support for the product designer throughout the entirety of the design process, to make high-quality circular design decisions.