Humanity-Centered Design for Circular Futures

May 6, 2025 | Guest Blog

By Hazal Gümüş Çiftçi Role: An assistant professor of industrial design at the Design School of Arizona State University and the Professional Chapter Chair of IDSA Phoenix

What if we do not need more innovation to thrive but only to repair what we already have? This question has lingered in my mind since the day I became an industrial designer. Therefore, I have been conducting workshops on repairing stuff – hands-on gatherings where people come together to mend broken items, share knowledge, and connect – for the last three years. This work came to life from a hopeful place: hope for humanity and responsibility for a healthy and prosperous future generation. A future in which repair is essential, not an afterthought.

Over the years, these workshops transformed into a living experiment. A living experiment in which I see Humanity-Centered Design (HCD+) as a way to collaborate constantly, share wisely, and listen carefully. I also have come to some realizations and changes in my view of how I can approach this pressing issue of consuming mindlessly – shifting our mindset from disposability to caring and from perfection to participation.

In this blog post, I would like to share these realizations, which reflect not only my views but also my workshop participants’ experiences.

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Learning from Each Other

This April marks three years since I started the repair workshops. I go to my workshops with an open mind, knowing that I’ll learn something new from my participants. This is true; each time, I am faced with either great questions or suggestions that I never thought of, which helps me improve the structure and content of my repair workshops.

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Creating a Community Requires Openness

When I started the workshops, my main goal was to inspire the community to repair their broken stuff. But I soon realized that repair was just the starting point. These workshops were quietly becoming community gatherings, spaces where people felt seen, heard, and supported. And the more we shared, not just tools and materials but stories, snacks, and mishaps, the richer the experience became. Trust and openness became the real glue that held everything together.

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Learning from Our Failures

In my mind, repairing something is a different form of making another thing. However, this time, as opposed to my profession – industrial design – there is always a good chance that there will be mistakes. It’s unpredictable. Things go wrong, glue doesn’t stick, patches pucker, and sometimes the fix fails entirely. And as usual, we are afraid of making mistakes, not creating a patch correctly, or not being able to use the right kind of glue. Since the day I became aware of this, I have kept a repair failures journal, and I often start my workshops with these anecdotes. Those are the moments I learned the most, and sharing it with my community sends a signal that we have room for failing. Because in the end, what’s the worst that can happen? A broken object stays broken. But more often than not, something even better takes shape: resilience, creativity, and a willingness to try again.

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Sharing Failures Requires Courage - But It’s Worth It

Last year, I was invited to run a 4-week long repair workshop with retirees who came in with immense knowledge for mending. I created a daily program for all of us since I love mending alongside my participants. This time, though, I was nervous because my audience most probably knew more than I did. So, I pushed myself from the get-go and shared my experience of using a handloom for the first time. For those of you who don’t know about hand-looms, they are small-scale looms with a 4-inch disc and are used for creating woven patches right on the fabric hole. These patches usually end up as squares or rectangles as you are weaving vertically and then horizontally; however, my first one ended up being a pineapple. The loom always grasps attention in the workshops, but very few end up using it because it looks time-consuming. This time, the moment I shared my experience, everyone in the room said they’d be willing to try it out.

Repairing the World Around Us with the Help of HCD+:

These workshops have taught me that repairing objects is really about repairing relationships with our things, with each other, and with the systems we live in. Circular futures aren’t just about recycling or reducing waste; they’re about reconnecting to what matters to humanity and designing for longevity, not convenience.

Humanity-Centered design means we honor the human experience: messy, imperfect, and full of meaning. We make space for mistakes. We share what we know. In doing so, we create more than functional fixes, we create a culture of care.
So, what might you repair today? Let’s repair the world one item at a time.

Hazal Gümüş Çiftçi

Dr. Hazal Gümüş Çiftçi is an assistant professor of industrial design at the Design School of Arizona State University and the Professional Chapter Chair of IDSA Phoenix. Her research revolves around design for sustainability, social innovation, crafts, and circularity. Her recent research agenda is about inspiring consumers to repair their belongings by learning basic repair skills and design thinking.

Instagram: fixerstudio_campus