Circular Design: What is the Digital Product Passport, Kenny Arnold?
To circular designer Kenny Arnold, the digital product passport could encourage a greater hybridity of skills for designers. Read why in this exclusive excerpt from the iF Design Trend Report 2024.
iF Design: What is a Digital Product Passport? What role does it play in the transition to more sustainable production and consumption practices?
I often explain Digital Product Passports (DPP) as an Industry 4.0 technology and like a type of smart PDF. It helps me to think of it as a digital document that is paired with a machine-readable digital record, and an individual product. DPPs comprehensively document a product’s entire lifecycle, potentially including specifications, usage history, environmental impact, recycling guidelines, regulatory compliance and ownership details. Data is collected throughout the product and supply chain and shared with relevant key actors across the value chain. The aim of these digital records is to provide the relevant information that helps extend the life of materials and products as long as possible to reduce the embodied carbon emissions.
iF Design: What effect do Digital Product Passports have on product design?
I think DPPs will have a subtle but significant impact on how we design and experience objects in use. Depending on the stage in a product’s lifecycle, users will be able to view relevant pieces of information such as its origin, where it has been, its previous owners, its material composition, and depending on condition, potentially its next destination. Just as a passport for people contains different records in its pages, a DPP will, too.
Image: DDP Diagram by Trustrace
iF Design: What is the biggest barrier to broad adoption? (i.e. corporate mindset, supply chain, accreditations, etc.) Which global companies are leading the transition?
Currently, governments and institutions from around the world are looking to the EU for clues on how DPPs will be implemented. Today in the EU, the Battery Regulation has already entered into force and companies have until February 2027 to implement a DPP solution. Another barrier to adoption is demonstrating to organizations how DPPs will benefit them instead of being framed as an expense compliance. This is a critical barrier to overcome particularly if a region is averse to mandating regulation. However, numerous organizations are already providing DPP platforms while others are adjusting their priorities to implement this technology. Several cross-sector collaborations are already underway with providers and platforms from organizations like AUDI, Amazon, SAP, Microsoft, Twaice, Twintag, Atma.io and many others.
iF Design: How and where can designers learn more about sustainable product development and receive further training about circular design principles?
Fortunately, there is an increasing amount of resources available as more people experiment with trying the circular way. The Ellen MacArthur Foundation has an extensive library of articles, case studies, podcasts, videos, activities and other educational material (www.emf.org). There are also material libraries and databases like the Circular Material Library Materiom that make available different types of circular materials via purchase or open source recipes that designers can use (circularmateriallibrary.org). I also would recommend following Leyla Acaroglu’s newsletter called Sustainability in Action.