A New Retail Interior Design Education Paradigm for a Circular Economy

Since the advent of a circular economy, typical strategies for change have focused on circularising existing business models or developing new closed-loop ones, where design is understood as a service provider, adapting its processes accordingly. This understanding and application of design is problematical, constraining and misdirecting any potential for effective innovation in the future. Interior design methodology needs to be completely rethought to create a sustainable circular design ecosystem. The learning and teaching of the interior design process has its foundation in an unsustainable, traditional economy that operates in a closed linear sequence of design, specification and fit-out. An undergraduate retail interior design project highlighted the need to evaluate designing for a circular economy as an ecosystem, based on the 10 R’s leading to four building blocks for the learning and teaching of circular retail interior design. Through analysis of the nature and existing use of design within a circular economy, it is possible to conceptualise the deconstruction of the existing linear process of interior design pedagogy and rebuild that process as a sustainable circular retail interior design methodology. This paper identifies four key sustainable design principles as a foundation for a new education paradigm for a circular interior design ecosystem model.