At the heart of the circular economy lies a simple question: how do people engage with it—and how can we make this better?
As our work in the DESINEX (Designing Circular Economy Experiences) project comes together, we find ourselves returning to a central insight: circular economy is shaped not only by systems, but by how people experience them—be it in consumer plastic recycling, secondhand marketplaces, or emerging platforms for surplus materials.
Why Experience Matters in the Circular Economy
The DESINEX project focused on understanding and designing the experiences of circular economy ecosystem stakeholders. We conducted studies across different circular economy contexts to reveal critical experiences, their triggers, and design implications. Together, the project findings show that adoption of the circular economy depends on lived experience, highlighting key design challenges—from managing uncertainty and enabling resourcefulness to navigating tensions between actors, materials, and value expectations. They also suggest that the circular economy cannot be realized through isolated actions but unfolds across interconnected actors, roles, and infrastructures, in which experiences are closely linked. For example, a reused textile does not move from one user to another on its own: it involves sellers, buyers, platforms, logistics providers, and regulatory and market pressures, all shaping how that experience works in practice.
Research on Circular Solutions in Practice
Within this work, a study co-authored by the project PI, Professor Elina Jaakkola, explored how business actors experience circular solutions within interorganizational partnerships (Alkki et al., 2025). The study identifies various business context-related experience triggers that affect actors’ cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, and sensory experiences. These experiences shape actors’ interactions, influencing not only internal practices but also collaborative practices across the value chain. The results highlight the importance of considering various experience triggers as the object of design interventions.
Postdoctoral Researcher Ekaterina Panina’s co-authored study has shown that uncertainty is a critical experience in secondhand marketplaces, shaping the actions of both sellers and buyers. The findings point to a key design task: not eliminating uncertainty altogether, but intentionally working with it through trust-building features, clear signals, and support mechanisms across the entire customer journey (Perez Lopez et al., 2025).
Ongoing work by Doctoral Researcher Bidyut Balo, funded by this project, highlights different pathways consumers take as they reuse materials, resell products, and recycle packaging in their daily lives. In these processes, consumers draw on whatever is available to them: their skills, environment, tools, and information. By doing so, they seek value from prolonging the use of the material objects, for themselves or others. This points to a design challenge of enabling resourcefulness—supporting consumers in navigating reuse, resale, and recycling by aligning services with their environments and capabilities.
At the same time, a study led by Olga Kauvosaari shows how businesses could design circular offerings by exploring a case of a surplus textile platform connecting circular economy-minded manufacturers. This study found that circular business-to-business experiences are shaped by tensions between efficiency and relational work, material variability and market expectations, and shared goals and uneven benefits, emerging at different stages of customer journeys. For design, this translates, for example, into creating tools that make surplus materials easier to list and compare, or enabling smarter matching based on buyer needs.
From Findings to Systemic Design
Based on our findings, we advocate systemic and multi-stakeholder approaches to design. In this context, design is less about perfecting individual touchpoints and more about making the whole system work together—aligning interactions, expectations, and relationships so that circular practices become feasible and meaningful for everyone involved.
This requires new methods. Instead of focusing only on individual user journeys, we need ways to understand how experiences are shared, connected, and co-created across different actors. These approaches help make visible how the circular economy actually unfolds in practice, and where design can make the biggest difference.
Co-Designing Circular Systems in Practice
To advance such goals, we brought together a diverse group of stakeholders involved in the circulation of consumer plastic packaging in Finland in a series of collaborative workshops. Participants included public authorities, packaging and food producers, recyclers, and waste management professionals, as well as consumer representatives. Together, we explored where the system “gets stuck” and how these bottlenecks might be addressed.
Initial insights suggest that challenges often arise at the intersection of consumer behavior (such as incorrect or limited sorting), emerging technologies (including the development of recyclable packaging that still protects products effectively), and evolving legislation. Importantly, the discussions did not stop at identifying problems. Instead, they opened up a shift in perspective: each actor can also be seen as a designer of others’ experiences within the system, shaping conditions that either enable or hinder participation.
To support this, we combined system mapping with design tools typically used in user-centered design, such as cards capturing key feelings and thought patterns that motivate or prevent action. This allowed participants to jointly envision how circular experiences could be improved across the system as a whole.
Looking Ahead
As the DESINEX project comes to a close, one message stands out: the circular economy succeeds when it works in practice for those involved. Designing for that reality remains an ongoing task. Building on the DESINEX project insights, our work continues through further research and collaboration toward developing solutions that support consumers, manufacturers, service providers, and policymakers alike, helping to turn the circular economy from ambition into everyday action.
Authors: Ekaterina Panina and Elina Jaakkola, Turku School of Economics
References:
Alkki, L., Aarikka-Stenroos, L., Jaakkola, E., & Pohls, E. L. (2025). How do business-to-business actors experience circular solutions? Uncovering the interplay between experience, interaction, and adaptation in the case of concrete element reuse. Industrial Marketing Management, 131, 181-195.
Pérez López, R., Yrjölä, M., Becker, L., Panina, E., & Saarijärvi, H. (2025). An experiential perspective on uncertainty in peer-to-peer platform services. Journal of Service Management, 36(6), 29-52.
Research group: DESINEX – Designing Circular Economy Experiences
Focus area: Future sustainable environment
Profile image: Professor Elina Jaakkola (PI) and Postdoctoral Researcher Ekaterina Panina