It's been awhile since I was last in a room with this many design talents at WARREN AND MAHONEY this morning.

As part of Auckland Design Week Ltd I thoroughly enjoyed facilitating this morning's panel discussion on 'Circular Design for a Changing Environment.' alongside these absolute weapons in the circular innovation space: Hilary West-Reeve (Pheonix Recycling), Jayden Klinac (@choose-anew), Maria Walker and Amanda Pearson (Aurecon)

In cased you missed it, here are some notes I took that you can apply in your practice today:

1. Circularity is a mindset. Design for what will happen to your products and projects at the end, at the start! (chur Jayden Klinac)

2. How do you stop your specification from being changed during construction? As designers, step into your rangatira space and call it out. Call it out to your clients, call it out to contractors and make it known the negative climate impacts of their choice. Back yourself. (Hilary West-Reeve)

3. Collaboration vs Competition? As designers, while competition is part of the job (and it's not a bad thing), we have to take a long term view to our building projects. Individual studios and firms may have commercial targets, but our carbon and zero waste targets are all the same as a nation. Collaboration will get us there and one way to do that is to share our data, our materials libraries across studios so we can help our built environment transition towards circularity. (Maria Walker)

4. How do we remove barriers so that it is easier for designers to adopt circularity into their products? (I Love this answer) Find ways in your daily practice to make it harder for business as usual to continue on. In other words, put up barriers for the barriers! Boom - Jedi mind trick it! haha. (Amanda Pearson and Hilary West-Reeve)

5. Recycled materials made locally is not only good for the planet, but also make for incredibly sexy projects. Choose to collaborate with local innovating in the low carbon and circularity space to drive outsized impact!

By applying these tips into your practice daily we can write the kind of future that will make our grandchildren proud.

I run a green building material company called Critical. (criticaldesign.nz) and we help designers create beautiful, low carbon and zero waste fit outs through Cleanstone, our range of 100% recycled plastic panels. If you have a project in mind, I'd love to kōrero. Send me a DM.

Thanks Wingates for the photo, hope you don't mind me stealing it off your page 😂 🤣 😅