Climate and existential crises urge us to assemble resources, relationships, and intelligence towards re-designing harmful and unsustainable structures that continue to dominate our industrialized societies. Instead of looking ahead, we can look around in unexpected places for vernacular practices that have been omitted or ignored in the tsunami of modernisation. Such practices have iterated over centuries, making them resilient and enduring, linked to wisdoms of interrelatedness and reciprocities among humans and broader ecologies.

As a participatory design researcher, implicated in disciplines that uncritically propel commodification and structural disrespect, I have been compelled to explore and pursue transformational approaches beyond the canons of dominant designs. If we accept that humans and more-than-humans have already been designing everywhere, what might such practices teach us of values, theories, approaches and worldviews that have been eroded or forgotten as significant? What might this enable for design and research, to revalue and renew, and in turn, give us courage to resist and reorientate?

One fruitful pursuit for some time, has been to renew and revalue wisdoms, relationships and practices from the islands and continents in the region of Asia-Pacific, including Japan and the lands now called Australia where I live currently. This work has helped me embrace the plurality of many minds, places, perspectives, relationalities and the fluidity and partiality of our own viewpoints. This also means to acknowledge contradictions, paradoxes and uncertainties as the premise of engaging with diverse participants.

This means continuously committing to working with and through difference as a fundamental condition of design researchers. I am very excited in contributing to ongoing dialogues on “Circular Design Praxis” that intermingle swirling currents of ideas, assets, influences, and practices as a generative, compositional force of heterogeneity. I value the urgency and the united passion by the various participants that will ally with many resonant and differing social movements around the world.

This initiative, arising out of Japan, could be seen as ‘ko-design’, instead of common parlance of ‘codesign’, harnessing the deep energy of kokoro (heart-mind-body-spirit) of people, animals, lands, waters, climates. Such connections are deeply rooted, lying dormant, to become visible and active during festivals, rituals and conventions that permeate the everyday. These are familiar to neighbouring islands and continents because of the well-worn shipping channels and trade exchanges where ideas and practices have always moved between. Renewing connections and forging alliances through kokoro helps us step outside of scale, productivity and development, that modern thinking has demanded, to revive and instil ways of being and relating, in doing this important and timely work together.

I am both humbled and passionate in being invited to such a worthy initiative.

Spring to Autumn
Perhaps we need not wind the clock that far back to see the fading of a Japanese circular economy. The setting for Yasujiro Ozu’s Late Spring (1949) depicts a resourceful material society constructed largely from recyclable biomaterials—wood, natural fibres, hides, papers, ceramics, stone, some simple metals. Whereas the cinematic trailer for Ozu’s Autumn Afternoon (1962) is book-ended by footage of belching factory chimneys, suggesting an economy increasingly articulated via plastic and other highly processed materials.

That move away from everyday circularity happened rapidly, recently, and almost everywhere. In Japan, integrated and holistic cultural traditions of packaging and gifting become embodied in pervasive plastic wrapping, of everything from onigiri in konbini to the paper napkins offered aboard a shinkansen. This is a long way from Hideyuki Oka’s 1975 book How To Wrap Five Eggs, a publication of beautifully-framed traditional practices that led George Nelson to lament “To suit the needs of super mass production, the traditional natural materials are too obstreperous . . . and one by one we have replaced them with the docile, predicable synthetics.”

Onigiri to konbini
Yet this is not simply about how we package the tangible everyday. Look up from the plastic-wrapped onigiri in your hand, and virtually everything else in the konbini embodies the linear economy. All the immediate products lining the shelves, of course, but looking wider, the interior’s materials, its appliances, the service infrastructures, the building itself. We might ‘pull the thread’ on these systems, untangling them in all directions, and so encounter every aspect of the logistics networks that continually refill the store, the industrial facilities that produce the goods, and the extractive processes that their raw materials are derived from.

Clearly, these are not simply Japanese issues. Yet those two illustrative layers — onigiri, konbini; wrapped snack, built environment — do happen to represent particular local dynamics.

Beyond that product packaging scale, the metabolism of Japanese built environments is unique, optimised for constant churn. This tendency for renewal can be highly beneficial from a cultural point of view, enabling the complex dynamics that define many Japanese cities. Indeed, such a metabolism expressed in wood is potentially regenerative. Yet for the last 70 years or so, that dynamic has been lashed to concrete, plastic, and steel instead. Those practices we must urgently rethink.

Good Cycle Building in Nagoya, by Nori Architects, embodies an alternative trajectory, with a cedar log, earth plaster, and ‘waste material’-led retrofit of a 30-year old building transformed in-situ rather than discarded. The renovation has care and repair to the fore, guided by respect and skill.

But systemic change concerns not only the architecture of a building, but the architecture of the problem: all aspects of how we might live well together, including our kinship with nature. Searching for this more meaningful relationship with materials, Kengo Kuma pointed out that “A cook never forgets the body but an architect often does”. Kuma’s choice of analogy is apt. We have often forgotten the material flows that we are part of, and that the city is made of. Yet a good cook knows precisely the provenance of vegetables, which rooftop the herbs are from, whose bees made the honey, who made the jar for the miso paste.

At elab in Kuramae, Tokyo, the cooks weave such systems in front of you, describing every detail of the food, and precisely how ‘circular’ it is. For example, elab’s bread is subtly infused with small flecks of cocoa husk, the only residue of the chocolate-making process that the nearby Dandelion chocolate factory cannot find a use for. Dandelion sends it across the street to elab, whose humble alchemy folds it into bread.

One imagines a circular neighbourhood is entirely possible in the resourceful and inventive Kuramae, its streets still patterned by small industrial units, craft work and shop fronts. Information networks, lightweight logistics, adaptable urban design, and committed individuals with shared ideals could weave the whole place together anew. The invisible threads tracing a circle from elab to Dandelion to a network of farms and suppliers beyond might be multiplied and diversified, such that the fabric of Kuramae begins to suggest a circular society with Japanese characteristics.

Movements to Moonshots
Sadly, these shining examples are hardly mainstream. Mass circularity requires an entirely different framing for business and industry, for society and culture, and in how we make shared decisions about shared things. But we can be thrilled by the scale of such agendas. Our journeys might start with humble experiments with everyday experiences, conducted by the likes of Nori Architects or elab. Yet far-reaching systemic change cannot be achieved solely through the ‘bottom-up’ actions of heroic or concerned individuals whilst ignoring the ‘top-down’ superstructures of policy, regulation and financing. Such an approach is not only unethical but also counterproductive, leading to two disconnected flywheels running counter to each other’s progress. The Swedish government’s mission-oriented innovation prototypes perhaps provide inspiration for how to bind these movements together, balancing ‘moonshot’-like technical programmes with social movement-like participative and place-based action.

Successfully running a portfolio of moonshots and movements woven together would include assessing how diverse networks of super-local examples, predicated on regenerative growth enabled by simple, participative materiality, might balance with technology-led projects propped up on traditional economic models, and more complex material flows. Government can subtly stimulate and steer such an array of approaches, if strategic design capabilities for portfolio-wrangling are at the helm. That requires new ideas of what governance is, yet recall the advice of Donella Meadows: the most powerful leverage points in system change concern these fundamental paradigms. We must connect the ‘top’ of engaged governance to the ‘bottom’ of diverse, pluralistic prototypes, to form a circle.

Autumn to Spring
More precisely, we must move circularity from niche to mainstream products, and from Kuramae’s tightly-bound milieu to all of Japan’s industrial and agricultural networks. We must move from throwaway packaging to regenerative supply chains, from Good Cycle Building to transformation of the built environment sector.

The scale, variety and systemic interconnectedness of these challenges poses significant questions. But could an open-minded searching across diverse knowledge systems sow the seeds for authentic circular design practices with Japanese spirit? How might we draw meaningful inspiration from the past before today’s throwaway society? How might we best cultivate and nurture examples in the present, like elab and its kin? How might we fuse both into the moonshots and movements of the future? In all this, might we see the dynamics of a new metabolism? Truly inventive circular design practices might see Japan’s autumn afternoon blossom once again as a new spring.