David Tapias, Fluidra's Innovation Director, shared with the attendees the challenges and lessons learned from their design and circular economy project developed in collaboration with EIG and Lúcid.

Attendees put collaboration into practice in a hands-on Circular Ventures workshop

On July 14, about twenty companies met to delve into the design of products and business models for a circular economy, as part of the Barcelona Design Week, within the Shift or crap cycle.

The session, organized by Lúcid, EIG and D! OS, aimed to share knowledge with manufacturing companies and guide them in the mindset needed to adopt a conceptual shift in the way they design and market their products.

A key element was the testimony of David Tapias, Fluidra's R&D director, who explained the in-depth work they are doing, collaborating with EIG on strategy and with Lúcid on product design.

The event, presented by Juan Mellen, president of D! OS, began with an explanation of the conceptual framework and design approach, led by Cristina Sendra, Technical Director of EIG, and Marc Fabra, co-founder and design director of Lúcid.

Achievable goals to improve people's lives

Cristina highlighted the importance of setting expectations to reach achievable goals while maintaining the vision, in a process that must integrate different aspects that affect all areas of the company. She also emphasized the importance of ensuring that materials used are safe and healthy at all stages of their life cycle, as a key aspect of any circular design.

From there, step by step, move towards the overall vision of the system into which it will be integrated, to ensure that it provides services adequately, both in its intended function and at the end of its useful life.

"At EIG, we don't work to create products that have less impact, but to regenerate ecosystems, the economy and improve people's lives," Cristina explained.

Design from the business model

Marc pointed out that designing a circular economy in the field of products requires a fundamental shift from thinking about the product, its function and aesthetics to designing from the business model. In other words, designing products that can respond and function in the new economic context.

By emphasizing a systems perspective, design can prevent the problems we currently face with products designed for a linear economy. Marc explained that 80% of a product's impact is determined in the design phase.

Commitment of leaders

David shared the context in which Fluidra decided to deepen this innovation process within its ESG strategy. He emphasized that fundamental aspect: the direct and continuous involvement of the company's top management, actively leading the change, together with the participation of several internal teams supported by external experts.

"To innovate in the product, you have to believe in it and create the culture, support it from leadership, with structure and resources."

As a key conclusion, he noted that by applying the Cradle to Cradle approach to product analysis, they discovered that they actually knew very little about both material composition and the supply chain behind it. This also makes it difficult to reduce upstream impacts and manage traceability and transparency of information.

David also explained that, within his company, they had to standardize and establish their own circularity criteria, breaking them down into real concepts associated with concrete values. In his case, they defined numerically how long their products had to last, the percentage of recycled material they should contain, their recyclability percentage and how much more repairable they should be, among many other indicators.

"Each company has to define with real values what it means to be circular. For us, it worked very well to determine how much more repairable, recyclable or durable our products should be," said David.

Attendees had the opportunity to engage in a dialogue with David, who generously shared his experience in detail. The large number of questions and the interest generated extended the initial discussion half an hour beyond the scheduled time.

Circular Ventures Workshop

We then moved on to the practical session, where all the companies had the opportunity to take on the challenge of disruptive thinking to create a circular form of joint ventures.

We hope you can join us for future sessions! 🙌