What is BMW Group's approach to circular economy?

"Framework Laptop 10/10 iFixit repairability score modular upgradable customizable open blueprint marketplace external developers, reversible joining disassembly equals easier cheaper assembly customization.

What is BMW Group's circular business model?

"BMW Rotterdam city partnerships dense urban infrastructure bidirectional charging air filtering data provision space energy storage, designer translator business model insights to product requirements integration."

What is BMW Group's circular business model?

"Product ecosystem business model value creation day one gap theory vs practice, ambiguity tolerance rethink process challenge, trade-offs constraints creative opportunities mindset not single tool organic process culture."

What company is discussed in this episode?

This episode features BMW Group and their approach to circular economy.

Circular Design: Systemic Innovation

February 17, 2026

0:00

How do you design circular systems, not just circular products?

In this episode, Anne Farken from Designworks, a BMW Group Company, talks about why circular design is not only about the product itself, but about the ecosystem around it. The conversation looks at the gap between saying design should be integrated from the beginning and actually thinking product and business model together from day one.

What you’ll hear in this episode:

How to design the product ecosystem and integrate product development, business model, and value creation from day one
The role of designers in translating business model insights into product requirements and facilitating integration across teams
Why the more you rethink a product, the more you need tolerance for ambiguity and alignment across teams

The episode also touches on why constraints and tradeoffs should be seen as creative opportunities.

This is the final episode in the series Implementing Circular Design Principles, produced in collaboration with the German Design Council.

The series explored how design decisions shape circular outcomes at the material, product, and system level, following the principles of Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.ns shape circular outcomes at the material, product, and system level, following the principles of Rethink, Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle.

People

Anne Farken, Associate Director Sustainability & Creative Consulting at Designworks, a BMW Group Company
https://www.linkedin.com/in/anne-farken-30bb823/

Patrick Hypscher, Circular Business Strategist, PaaS Expert
https://www.linkedin.com/in/hypscher/

Chapters

00:00 Introduction
02:15 Personal Insights on Circular Products
04:59 Ecosystem Interaction in Circular Design
08:34 Examples of Circular Products
11:56 The Role of Designers in Circular Economy
16:34 Integrating Knowledge and Expertise
20:16 Tools and Mindset for Circular Thinking

About

BMW Group Designworks is the innovation studio of the BMW Group. Around half of its projects are delivered for clients beyond the automotive industry through its design and creative consulting services, operating from studios in Munich, Shanghai, and Los Angeles.

Working across diverse industries allows Designworks to generate valuable outside-in impulses that fuel collaborative projects with the BMW Group’s brands.
In parallel, third-party clients leverage the studio’s automotive know-how by working with Designworks.

Further Links

Find more information about:
Circular Design Summit: https://www.german-design-council.de/en/circular-design-summit

Transcript

[00:00:00] Introduction

Anne Farken: The knowledge is there, but how you put it together and create something that in result is better than what we have before, there’s a huge opportunity in there. The more it goes into rethink, the more challenging is the process itself.

Jingle: My name is Patrick Hypscher and this is Circularity.fm, the podcast about understanding, building and managing circular business models.

Patrick Hypscher: Welcome back to our series Implementing Circular Design Principles in partnership with the German Design Council. In the first episode of the series, we discussed with Andreas Maegerlein from BASF how materials enable and limit circular design. In the last episode, product designer Nicola Stattmann shared how she approaches the design of a circular product. Today we explore the interaction of circular design with the business model and the organizational process around it. Keep in mind, if you want to learn more about circular design, visit the Circular Design Summit. The next one is coming up end of March, 2026 in Stuttgart, Germany. I’ll add a link to it in the show notes.

Before we start, I have an offer for you. If you want to get the actionable one-pager about this conversation, sign up for the Circularity.fm newsletter. You can find it as always at www.circularity.fm.

Her academic background is in strategic design, sustainability, and product language. She built a longstanding career at DesignWorks, the innovation studio of the BMW Group. Around half of the projects of DesignWorks are delivered for clients outside the automotive industry through its design and creative consulting services operating from studios in Munich, Shanghai, and Los Angeles.

Her current position is Associate Director Sustainability and Creative Consulting. She specializes in the systemic integration of sustainability and circular design principles into business strategies. Welcome, Anne.

[00:02:15] Personal Insights on Circular Products

Anne Farken: Thank you.

Patrick Hypscher: Anne, let’s start with a personal question. What is one of your preferred circular services or products?

Anne Farken: That’s indeed not such an easy question, what I use regular. And this is one example that I use on a weekly basis is actually the Kartoffelkombinat. So connected to food. So it’s a Germany, Munich, a little bit outside Munich based community supported agriculture. And the Kartoffelkombinat is supplying, I think, there are about 2,300 households already with regional, seasonal, sustainable food.

And yeah, I’m in this Kartoffelkombinat since the test phase. And it’s very interesting to see it growing. So here we are talking more about the biological cycle, of course. No waste, really short distances. So local production. And apart from this, the quality as a kind of user or as a member, the quality of the food is very good. Especially in salad, you can really taste it.

So it’s not just kind of circular, sustainable, but it’s actually very delicious. So yeah, that’s one example I regularly use. And the other one is Nebenan.de. Probably everybody knows this kind of neighborhood support in so many different areas. And there it’s more about kind of borrowing and lending machines, even stools when having a party or so on.

[00:04:59] Ecosystem Interaction in Circular Design

Patrick Hypscher: It’s interesting because you already emphasize on the let’s say social dimension or community dimension of the service or product which this episode is all about. So in the previous two episodes, we talked about circular design in the context of materials, and in the following episode, it was with a focus on products itself. And now we want to look a bit more how does the ecosystem of a product interact with the circular product design. The ecosystem is relevant for the product and the product design.

I feel like this is not only relevant for today and tomorrow. It has been relevant forever since. So if I personally just reflect on the car that is kind of existing in an inner ecosystem. It wouldn’t work without petrol stations. It wouldn’t work without repair shops. You need dealers that sell different tires. You need also even the interface with the public authorities when it comes to authorization, norms, standards, security reasons. All these repair shops, for example, the petrol stations, they’re not run by the brands. They’re run by independent entrepreneurs and other companies.

Are there any other specific and maybe even surprising connections where, based on your experience, an automotive company like BMW is working with some stakeholders?

Anne Farken: Yeah, especially, I mean, around the world, one important stakeholder is cities because this is also important, kind of the dense city infrastructure. That’s very important to think of a city as a stakeholder. So the BMW Group has actually city partnerships and especially in Rotterdam. We also have different projects and use it as a testing ground and collaborating also within the city with different stakeholders. And there one topic with Mini was actually to ask what role does the car play in the city of the future in the dense urban area? And what is the reason to exist because we have a space problem and so on.

And there are topics kind of coming up that how the car itself integrates into the city infrastructure as saving energy or storing energy, giving energy, kind of filtering the air, providing data that the city can use in topics that are maybe not so obvious at first hand, but that can also be translated into requirements for car development, for example, the bidirectional charging, what we are doing actually right now with the cars and so on.

Patrick Hypscher: So this sounds to me a bit like also what’s the public service a car or a future car can deliver to the community, the city, beyond the person who’s driving it.

Anne Farken: Exactly. And it’s kind of a vehicle that serves also the community and plays its part and is actually a benefit to the city than just kind of using space and being beautiful.

Patrick Hypscher: I guess then that’s obviously this does have implications for product design and it gives rise to new business model opportunities because some of the services, let’s say, come for free to the public and some might be an opportunity also to generate revenue.

Do you have another example from maybe another industry where the product interacts a bit with the ecosystem just to make to get some more inspirations for listeners?

[00:08:34] Examples of Circular Products

Anne Farken: A very interesting product in my view is the Framework Laptop. This is kind of a laptop that is from the ground up built to be upgradable and to be customizable. So it has this kind of open systems thinking. The architecture of the laptop is built like this so you can order kind of a prefabricated version or do it yourself version and kind of customize it to your needs. And I think that’s very interesting because this is very modular. You can extend or you extend the product life and you can also kind of customize it completely to your needs.

And what is also interesting from the approach of an open systems thinking, they have this kind of marketplace where they also open the blueprint, the interfaces for developers so that external developers can kind of create products for this laptop. And that’s interesting because it’s like a physical market space and you have more variety and also repairability. You can easily open it. They have very good kind of explanations.

And as far as I know, they developed also this laptop with iFixit, this repair platform. And there they have a score out of 10 from 10 concerning the repairability, which is great. And similar examples are the Fairphone, which has a similar thinking behind, or the Shiftphone. And yeah, as far as I know, it’s still a niche product, but it stands for somehow a new product approach going from kind of singular closed products into designing a more open system. But as far as I know, they are also quite successful in also expanding in different markets.

Patrick Hypscher: So basically trying to wrap that up, really as a designer you need or you have the opportunity to think beyond the, let’s say, physical product. You want to understand the environment in which it is or delivers value and also think about the preconditions. Are partners available that can repair it? Can customers repair themselves? Do we have spare parts for that? For how long do we keep the spare parts? Or do we even open up the design of specific components so that customers or third party providers can produce or maybe even 3D print spare parts? Or even, as you said, the Framework open up the certain specs so that third party companies can create their own additional components. This is a huge box of opportunities.

[00:11:56] The Role of Designers in Circular Economy

Patrick Hypscher: Let’s switch a bit to the role of the designer. Is it possible to grasp that?

Anne Farken: There is no golden grail. So as we see in practice, every kind of challenge is different. A good approach is to name it and try to define it, what we are talking about within the challenge we have. So is it kind of material substitution, going to more recyclable materials? Is it a product optimization where we have to kind of improve a train seat, for example, to make it lighter or an aeroplane seat?

Even if you say you want kind of more sustainable materials, then the question is, so what defines sustainability within this product? Is it more lightweight? Is it kind of recycled content, then it’s the question, is it a post-consumer or post-industrial? So then kind of framing the challenge with the sustainability, circularity and also business criteria. And then you have the intention and goals set within all the people that are kind of integrated in the project, in the challenge.

Quality and the strength lies in that you are aware of what you are looking at. And then you merge it with hard factors and criteria, ideally KPIs, how to measure it, and then merge it kind of with all the other lenses, like of course market fit, aesthetics. Aesthetics still plays a good role, but it’s kind of, it’s important that we, in the process, balance out these kind of hard and soft factors and also are aware that you have these trade-offs of costs, of aesthetics.

So, and then it’s also a matter of communication and seeing in the process. So how do we evaluate also with tools? How do we measure and compare different concepts? And then take a more informed decision also in circularity and sustainability. The knowledge is out there, but it’s not necessarily we have all the knowledge right at the beginning. And then it’s also finding partners and also getting from our clients the information that we need in order to integrate it.

Patrick Hypscher: On that one, I was asking myself when listening to you, there are so many opportunities and there are so many fields. Be it materials, be it business models, be it financial incentives, regulation. How do you organize the know-how in a team?

Anne Farken: It’s interconnected knowledge. Depending on the challenge and the project, you integrate other competencies that are not design. So in one project, we integrated somebody from the life cycle assessment department, also from the recycling competence center, in order to bring this knowledge from the back right to the front.

That’s also interesting in the process because these people usually don’t work as closely with design. It’s not without friction because the people from other fields and experts from other fields speak different languages. You have to kind of calibrate and then see, so what is our goal? The knowledge is there, but how you put it together and create something that in result is better than what we have before. There’s a huge opportunity in there. The more it goes into rethink, the more challenging is the process itself and the more kind of ambiguity tolerance you need to have.

[00:16:34] Integrating Knowledge and Expertise

Patrick Hypscher: And how do you handle the know-how and imagination about business models?

Anne Farken: In terms of business model, I mean, there are so many experts in the different areas, also experts looking into different value creation. But usually kind of this, and I’m talking in general, I think design is always said, it needs to be integrated right from the beginning in circular economy. Design is so important, but in practice, to really think the product system right from the beginning, the product substance and the product system right from the beginning with the business model and value creation. I think there is a lot of opportunity here.

We have, of course, business experts and business model experts apart from so many different experts that are important for circular economy. And in one project, we integrated kind of one team member who was direct from the business strategy, but we also integrated external partners who are specialized in circular business models.

So, and that was also interesting, the role of design, because we had the concept in place kind of on a conceptual level product. Product and service, product and ecosystem. And then with kind of these business people, but also end of life experts and a lot of other experts, we managed to integrate this business thinking into the product thinking. And I think it’s very, very important that there are people in the process that are able to translate, for example, a finding in the business model to translate it into a product requirement, for example, to make repairability economically feasible. So how can the product architecture be built that it’s economically feasible?

Also interesting, the role of design, for example. Regulation is coming up, disassembly. And in circular economy, circular product design, this plays always a role, is a lot of talked about. But what do I need for disassembly? I need also reversible joining technologies, for example. And this is then also what I can use for customization, individualization in the product use phase.

Out of the trade-offs to use creativity, to use this kind of, to cherish the boundaries, cherish the trade-offs and think of something to resolve it. So, and also kind of the disassembly, of course, maybe regulation is the driver, but also the assembly gets easier and cheaper as well.

Yeah, I think designers can play a big role in also kind of bringing a different perspective to the table and integrating the business lens into the product and experience design.

[00:20:16] Tools and Mindset for Circular Thinking

Patrick Hypscher: And slowly coming to an end, is there one tool or are there two tools where you say this is a good instrument or a great method to integrate circular thinking or even maybe circular business model thinking into the design process?

Anne Farken: Because it’s complex in a way, there is not one tool. I would say the tool is mindset that you create an environment and the knowledge within the process that you have this mindset of applying, of integrating the knowledge that you need. There are tools for design where you can compare different concepts with tools, also for material selection. We have tools where you can also say, I want a substitute for this and looking at the embodied energy of materials, recyclability of materials. So there are tools and databases for this. So this helps to kind of speed up and be more effective in what you are looking for.

But in general, I would say it’s not so much about one tool that solves the problem. From my experience in these challenges, it’s having a more organic process and then kind of think and compose to have kind of a process culture so to say, that you don’t kind of limit yourself to the process because in order to create better and new solutions that are maybe not completely new but work with a different logic.

Patrick Hypscher: The follow up question would be how do you create an environment that people can develop such a mindset or also apply such a mindset?

Anne Farken: I think it’s through experience actually. It’s by doing it, by kind of also taking the time somehow in the beginning and not to go right into a sketch, that you really truly understand what you are talking about and then together as a team work on the solution. And it’s so interesting because there was one designer, she said, actually within the process, she said, it’s so interesting because I don’t feel that I’m working on sustainability because it’s so much fun. It’s so joyful to work on it. I think this is a proof that within the process, if this is done in a good way and with the right people, it’s changing the mindset naturally.

And maybe to your question, it’s good to have experienced people in, but also it’s just by doing it and not being afraid and not having the Anspruch to make it perfect. So I think it’s starting with little steps and I think communication is a key, is a key quality also in the team and also to, as I mentioned before, to have this ambiguity tolerance and to see it positively that there are a lot of hard discussions and so on. But as long as you balance all the different perspectives and then jointly come to a decision, there is a big chance that a good result will finally result out of this process.

Patrick Hypscher: And that to me also sounds like good news. So everyone working on circularity gets more experience every day, which makes all of us slightly better and more prepared to solve the challenges of tomorrow. Anne, thanks a lot for sharing your experience.

Anne Farken: Yeah, pleasure. Thank you.

Patrick Hypscher: This was our last episode in this series about implementing circular design principles. If you want to get the actionable one-pager about this conversation, sign up for the Circularity.fm newsletter. You can find it at www.circularity.fm. This series was produced in cooperation with the German Design Council. Thanks to the council for facilitating it. You want to learn more about circular design? Consider joining the upcoming Circular Design Summit. It will happen end of March 2026 in Stuttgart. If by now this is already in the past, still check out the website. I’m pretty sure there will be more circular design summits coming up in the following years. Until then, let’s drive a profitable circular economy. And please don’t forget, the most abundant renewable resource is your imagination.