This article makes a case that artists can use their skills towards more ecological outcomes. I couldn't agree more. Here is an article written by Ben Valentine and featured on Hyperallergic.com

This is a list of design considerations for designing your product, service, business, or organization to join to the Circular Economy. 

Design for Durability
Design for Repairability
Design for Lightweight
Design for Renewable Energy Use
Design for Adaptability
Design for Extended Use
Design for Zero Waste 
Design for Reuse
Design for Modularity
Design for Disassembly
Design for Upcycling
Design for Remanufacturing
Design for Recycling
Design for Decomposition
Design for Restoration
Design for Regeneration
Design for Desirability
Design for Job Creation
Design for Versatility
Design for Accessibility
Design for Connection
Design for Inspiration

By: Chelsea Peil at ecocreativestrategies.com
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Thanks to all the minds that have and those that will continue to, develop and support the circular economy and other supporting concepts. The list of thinkers is long.

Words are not enough, nor evolve quick enough to catch up with new concepts. Thank goodness there is visual thinking. It's nothing new but, using pictures to capture ideas, lessons learned, and record processes changes the conversation. Using visual thinking, or graphic facilitation, is effective in the planning and strategy process because it is symbolic, translatable, and more specific. 

In the program innovation sphere, sharing ideas that are visually digestable are less likely to be misunderstood. Learning to simplify the conversation for your team, clients, or for yourself keeps jargon from getting in the way of making meaningful connections. Design thinking with images also shares concepts that can build collaborative rapport, are more accessible to a range of stakeholders, and access the creative right brain. 

If people don’t understand your vocabulary they won’t connect with you or your concepts. In our work we use images to help people understand what is or what could be and how to get there. Graphically mapping ideas is simple, but crucial for getting out of uninspired ruts and chatter. 

Work above by Stef Koehler of Letscocreate.org

Art is a powerful language that speaks to the older brain, the right brain. Through the use of image, color, metaphor, and materials art speaks deeply to the emotional, unconscious, and moral or value based level in people. For example, I show you a word, “leaf”, this word is a series of letters representing a concept, the word is an abstraction and will only conjure your previous experience with a leaf. If I show you an actual leaf from an Aspen tree, immediately, you understand so much more about the context surrounding the leaf, it’s from a tree, it might have had a bug on it, it needs water and soil to live, it is part of a whole system and is not a singular abstract concept. 

 Art works much the same way even if intellectually you don’t understand what the art is exactly saying. Leonard Shlain, an amazing author of Art & Physics explains the power of the intuitive artists to help understand new concepts in physics. He also wrote The Alphabet vs. the Goddess and shows the history of the unintended consequences of the alphabet to the right brain sensibilities such as to creativity, the feminine, and nature. Both of these works have reinforced my belief in the power of using art and images in planning processes, such as working with graphic recorders or visual communicators. Additionally, using art to inspire, design, dialogue, and communicate helps prepare minds for new realities and smarter ways of thinking. Using methods that reach the right brain to inspire creative solutions in design thinking or accessing whole systems thinking are psychologically relevant and scientifically supported approaches. Since computers are taking over much of our left brain activities, more value is placed on right brain activities that can’t be artificially mimicked. The results run deeper and if we use the whole brain, the creative and logical, the systematic and the specific. This is how conscious companies work and will need to in the current climate. Thinking differently to get different results requires an artful approach.