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Ways of evaluating the societal impact of real-world labs as a transdisciplinary and transformative research format are under discussion. We present an evaluation approach rooted in structuration theory, with a focus on structure-agency dynamics at the science-society interface. We applied the theory with its four modalities (interpretation schemes, norms, allocative and authoritative resources) to the case of the Mirke neighbourhood in Wuppertal, Germany. Six projects promoted the capacity for co-productive city-making. The effects of the projects were jointly analysed in a co-evaluation process. Previously proposed subcategories of the modalities as an empirical operationalisation were tested and confirmed as being applicable. Five new subcategories were generated. The use of the modalities seems appropriate for co-evaluation processes. The tool is practical, focused on real-world effects, and suitable for transdisciplinary interpretation processes. We encourage further empirical testing of the tool, as well as development of the subcategories.
Gaining deep leverage? : Reflecting and shaping real-world lab impacts through leverage points
(2024)
Real-world laboratories (RwLs) are gaining further traction as a means to achieve systemic impacts towards sustainability transformation. To guide the analysis of intended impacts, we introduce the concept of leverage points, discerning where, how, and to what end RwLs intervene in systems. Building on conceptual reasoning, we further develop our argument by exploring two RwL cases. Examining RwLs through the lens of the leverage points opens the way for a balanced and comprehensive approach to systemic experimentation. We invite RwL researchers and practitioners to further advance RwLs' transformative capacity by targeting the design and emerging direction of a system, contributing to a culture of sustainability.
In light of Egypt's transition to a green economy, this report focuses on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and increasing resource efficiency along three different value chains in which small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a crucial role. In order to support SMEs in Egypt to take advantage of implementing greening options along value chains, more detailed analyses are needed. Therefore, the aim of this study is to analyse three selected supply chains to identify greening opportunities for SMEs. Against this background, the project report is structured as follows: Chapter 2 introduces the background with an overview over the concept of green economy followed by Egypt's economy and its green economy. This is followed by a presentation of the value chains and an overview of the respective sectors. Chapter 3 describes the research approach, methods and data collection. The following chapters examine the three selected value chains cotton, sugar beet and refrigerators, including environmental hot spots, greening options as well as the experts' evaluation of those greening options. The report concludes with key recommendations in Chapter 7.
Real-world labs are witnessing continued growth and institutionalization in the field of transformation-oriented sustainability research, as well as in adjacent disciplines. With their experimental research agendas, these labs aim at sustainability transformations, however, there is still a need to improve the understanding of their impacts. Drawing from this Special Issue's contributions, we offer a broad overview of the impacts achieved by various real-world labs, highlight the diverse areas and forms of impact, and elucidate strategies as well as mechanisms for achieving impact. We present methodological advances, and address common challenges along with potential solutions for understanding and realizing impact.
To date, the circular economy has fallen short of its promise to reduce our resource demand and transform our production and consumption system. One key problem is the lack of understanding that highly promising strategies such as refuse, rethink, and reduce can be properly addressed using research on sufficiency. This article argues that a shift in focus is required in research and policy development from consumers who buy and handle circularly designed products to consumption patterns that follow the logic of sufficiency and explain how sufficiency-oriented concepts can be incorporated into existing social practices. The authors show that sufficiency is not necessarily as radical and unattractive as is often claimed, making it a suitable yet underrated strategy for sustainability and the transition to an effective circular economy. The case of urban gardening shows that small interventions can have far-reaching effects and transform consumption patterns as the logic of availability is contested by newly developed concepts of "enoughness" and opposition to "über-availability." The authors propose utilizing comprehensive state-of-the-art theories of consumption and human action when developing strategies and policies to make the circular economy sustainable while being more critical of utilitarian approaches. Using social practice theories that have proven to be beneficial allows human actions to be comprehensively analyzed by recognizing their embeddedness in social and material frameworks; addressing the meaning, competences, and materials of routinized human behavior; and examining indirect effects.
Leftovers lovers vs. haters : a latent class analysis on dinner leftover management behaviours
(2023)
Leftovers are particularly at risk of being discarded, and therefore a main component of household food waste. This study provides insights into sources of heterogeneity in leftover management behaviours, with a particular focus on the use of meal kits providing matched portion and ingredient sizes, and identifies consumer segments via a latent class analysis. We investigate whether belonging to a segment with positive attitudes toward leftovers, and engagement in conscious leftover management behaviours decreases the amounts of dinner leftovers and food waste. Besides, we demonstrate that several food waste antecedents, emotions, personal norms, intention and dinner procurement routines elicit leftover management segment membership. In addition to examining such individual differences, we also investigate the role of meal-level determinants, in particular, whether meal kits heterogeneously affect dinner leftovers depending on the consumer's leftover management segment.
Data was collected from 868 households from six countries, using an online survey and diaries. Results of the latent class analysis point towards five consumer segments. We found differences in dinner leftovers amount across classes and detected heterogeneous effects of meal kits. That is, meal kits were able to diminish leftovers in two segments, but not in the other segments. These results provide novel insights into consumer heterogeneity regarding the occurrence, antecedents, and potential solutions of leftovers and resulting household food waste. Implications for both theory and policy are discussed.
The word "literacy" has come to be used to describe a wide range of competencies, including design literacy - a term that, despite its presence in design discourse, is still characterised by a certain fuzziness. In this paper, we explore this highly discursive theoretical field in order to gain a more nuanced and expanded understanding of the topic. In doing so, we argue that these divergent positions are also due to the ambiguity of the term “design”.
We understand design as the perpetual de- and reconstruction of the world, as a way of worldmaking, both physically and conceptually. Thus, design literacy can be understood as a way to perceive traces of design and its processes, to perceive the world as contingent: a circular cognitive process of recognising that something - if not everything - in our cultural pluriverse is designed, understanding how it was designed and that it can potentially become the subject of design again and again. In our paper, we emphasise the contingency of design - and the ethical level that can arise from understanding the possibility of a different design.
Ultimately, our aim with this paper is to emphasise that design literacy is a crucial competence for encouraging pluralistic perspectives and initiating transition processes, as it helps to acknowledge the temporary necessity but long-term non-necessity of things (which particularly includes the transitory nature of one's own creations).
The international architecture competition Solar Decathlon Europe was held in Wuppertal in 2022 and focused on sustainable building and living in the city. The student teams participating in the competition developed buildings that would enable climate-friendly living and be tailored to the "Mirke" district in Wuppertal and the individual needs of the residents in this neighborhood. Not only the neighborhood was the focus of the competition, but also the residents of the Mirke district were involved in the project through a neighborhood panel. As part of the Mirke neighborhood panel, three survey waves were conducted between May 2021 and August 2022. The results and insights gained from the neighborhood panel were incorporated into the project and shared with the architectural teams participating in the competition. In addition, the results were shared and discussed with the urban development department of the city of Wuppertal, local initiatives, and other partners in the neighborhood.
Biodiversity is under threat all over the planet. Implementing sustainable out-of-home catering (OHC) is a key way to reduce the environmental impact of the agri-food sector. Thus far, there have been no studies that show the impact of food on biodiversity at the menu level in Germany. This means that neither commercial kitchens nor their patrons can record the biodiversity impact of the menus or dishes served there. This article describes the development of an assessment framework and some initial findings. The framework was developed on the basis of a systematic literature review and expert interviews. Taking this as a starting point, an indicator-based approach was developed with a focus on land use. The approach was then validated by assessing recipes used at OHC facilities. The results show that using the BiTe Biodiversity Index (BBI) that was developed, it is possible to assess the biodiversity impacts of meals and optimize them at the level of the dish. The article outlines the possible areas for improvement. Overall, it is clear that this approach can already be used in the OHC context today.
The impending climate catastrophe gives rise to an increased environmental awareness among many designers, who direct their work towards the paradigm of sustainability. While designing with an "ecological lens" is necessarily oriented towards the future, we highlight the past as an inspiring realm to explore. Rather than recycling materials, we encourage the recycling of ideas as a combination of historiographic and speculative design methods.
We will present a framework that extends the idea of design as a "projecting" activity into the idea of design as a constant negotiation process about the relevance and appropriateness of current and past technologies. Design revolves not just about what will be, but to a large extent about what should remain and what should recur, or as Jan Michl put it: "seeing design as redesign" (Michl 2002). We will illustrate the thought of designing futures with pasts by means of a research project that aims at developing a refrigerator for circular economy. The refrigerator - as the currently dominant technology to preserve food - will serve as a starting point to show how artefacts and architecture as well as human skills and knowledge in the preparation and preservation of food are historically interlinked. The history of food preservation unfolds not only along the evolution of the refrigerator, but encompasses household techniques like smoking, curing and fermenting, as well as long-forgotten architectural "answers" such as deep-freeze community buildings. We will revisit three historical examples of food preservation and present the method ‘throwing’ past ideas into the future.
Three main arguments are presented in this richly illustrated paper: First, that historiography is a form of designing, second, that designing is constituted and influenced by path dependencies (cf. David 1985) that are deeply rooted in the past and third, that the past is a valuable source of inspiration when designing for sustainable development. Looking at history becomes a way of "mental window shopping" (Simon 1985, 188) for approaches that are to be reactivated and transformed.
The circle is a ubiquitous metaphor in the current scientific and political debate on possible strategies for coping with the changes brought by the so-called "Anthropocene". Terms such as "recycling", "upcycling", "downcycling", "life cycle" or "circular economy" all refer to the same geometric shape, which in turn can be found in numerous diagrams illustrating the respective design approaches and political strategies. But how does the circle shape the way we think and act as designers? Is it an appropriate metaphor to guide us to feasible actions, or is its degree of simplification too far removed from reality? In this article we look at the circular economy as a designed model, and question the circle as a communication tool for the cultural project of sustainability. As the circle may carry the risk of an oversimplified, unattainable, even disillusioning ideal, we discuss various alternative images and forms for their potential to become metaphors of alternative models. The hole, the plate, the pasture, the wheel, the mill wheel, the hamster wheel, the vortex, the double helix, the spider web and the rhizome - as metaphors, they each open up different perspectives and approaches to reality, they each construct different relationships and dependencies between nature and culture. The aim of this article is less about postulating the end of the circle as a metaphor in the sustainability debate, as it is about to fathom the circle's ends as a metaphorical tool. In other words, when does the metaphor of the circle become too abstract? As designers we can say that falling in love with a form right at the beginning of a design process can be rather limiting, as hardly any alternatives will be considered, and all further decisions are subordinated to achieving the desired shape. Therefore, we would like to emphasise the contingency of the circular economy as a model. We would like to welcome the thought that the circle has an "end".
The food system faces a multitude of challenges, including high greenhouse gas emissions, threats to biodiversity, increased diet-related diseases due to unbalanced diets, and socially problematic complex supply chains. This requires not only a transformation of the agricultural economy but also a change in the diet and lifestyles of all consumers. Developing and using digital and technological innovations can help to solve these challenges. In this context, the study provides impulses on how digitalisation can contribute to transforming production and consumption and which prerequisites have to be given to achieve this.
The study describes the approaches for digitalisation along the value chain. These include optimising the use of resources in agriculture - for example with the help of smart farming - and supporting consumers with digital tools and assistance systems - such as apps designed to support grocery shopping. In addition, new business models and a better connection between production and consumption processes are also possible. This includes, for example, new digital sales channels or tracking and communicating sustainability indicators such as CO2 emissions across all steps of the value chain in order to enable all stakeholders to take reliable action.
Causal strands for social bonds : a case study on the credibility of claims from impact reporting
(2022)
The study investigates if causal claims based on a theory-of-change approach for impact reporting are credible. The authors use their most recent impact report for a Social Bond to show how theory-based logic models can be used to map the sustainability claims of issuers to quantifiable indicators. A single project family (homeownership loans) is then used as a case study to test the underlying hypotheses of the sustainability claims. By applying Bayes Theorem, evidence for and against the claims is weighted to calculate the degree to which the belief in the claims is warranted. The authors found that only one out of three claims describe a probable cause–effect chain for social benefits from the loans. The other two claims either require more primary data to be corroborated or should be re-defined to link the intervention more closely and robustly with the overarching societal goals. However, all previous reported indicators are below the thresholds of the most conservative estimates for fractions of beneficiaries in the paper at hand. We conclude that the combination of a Theory-of-Change with a Bayesian Analysis is an effective way to test the plausibility of sustainability claims and to mitigate biases. Nevertheless, the method is - in the presented form - also too elaborate and time-consuming for impact reporting in the sustainable finance market.
Household food waste is determined by a complex set of routinized behaviors, and disruption of these routines may allow for a decrease in this vast amount of food waste. The current study examines such a disruption of household routines: the meal box. The potential of meal boxes to diminish different types of household food waste is investigated for the first time, across different countries. After providing a framework comparing the effects of different types of meals on food waste, we subsequently examine the effects of subscription-based food supply (i.e., meal boxes) on total meal waste as well as on the different types of food waste: preparation, cooking, and plate waste. Our dataset contains 8747 meal observations from 955 households in six countries. Results from a Bayesian multilevel hurdle-lognormal model with random intercept show that, overall, meal boxes reduce total meal waste in comparison to traditionally cooked dinners (38% reduction). Meal boxes especially lower the occurrence and amount of pan-and-pot food that is wasted (i.e., cooking waste), and also lower the amount of meal preparation waste, yet lead to a higher occurrence of both preparation and plate waste compared to traditional meals. This shows how differences between meals affect household food waste, something that has received little prior research attention. Furthermore, whereas most prior research has focused on overall household food waste, our study illustrates that distinguishing between different types of household food waste can provide important new insights.
Food and nutrition systems are linked to all Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which makes their transition toward social-ecological behavior patterns crucial for an overarching sustainability transformation. The perspective of (urban) logistics is of special interest. It couples the production and consumption physically and virtually. In this context, we shed light on the design of the turnover point of food in urban areas from the supply chain toward consumers and contribute to an overarching systemic perspective toward establishing a sustainable multilevel food system. We describe current patterns in urban food systems and propose several principles for sustainable design of (urban) food systems based on concepts such as (regional) collaboration and food literacy. Using these principles, we provide four design scenarios that concretely imagine future urban food consumption and production patterns titled "slow stock supply service," "deliver into the daily walk," "central district food depot," "super food action place." With this work we provide a starting for reflecting whether certain combinations of principles actually lead to patterns of daily life that are feasible, acceptable, or desirable. Moreover, we provide an initial qualitative assessment to stimulate further research that explores scenario pathways and incorporates additional indicators regarding the impact on social-ecological. We open up various research questions with regard to the overarching question of how urban food logistics should be designed to be consistent with the SDGs.
The food system plays a crucial role in mitigating climate change. Even if fossil fuel emissions are halted immediately, current trends in global food systems may prevent the achieving of the Paris Agreement's climate targets. The high degree of variability and uncertainty involved in calculating diet-related greenhouse gas emissions limits the ability to evaluate reduction potentials to remain below a global warming of 1.5 or 2 degrees. This study assessed Western European dietary patterns while accounting for uncertainty and variability. An extensive literature review provided value ranges for climate impacts of animal-based foods to conduct an uncertainty analysis via Monte Carlo simulation. The resulting carbon footprints were assessed against food system-specific greenhouse gas emission thresholds. The range and absolute value of a diet carbon footprint become larger the higher the amount of products with highly varying emission values in the diet. All dietary pattern carbon footprints overshoot the 1.5 degrees threshold. The vegan, vegetarian, and diet with low animal-based food intake were predominantly below the 2 degrees threshold. Omnivorous diets with more animal-based product content trespassed them. Reducing animal-based foods is a powerful strategy to decrease emissions. However, further mitigation strategies are required to achieve climate goals.
The steel industry is responsible for a quarter of all industrial greenhouse gas emissions. So far, the environmental savings are mainly due to steel recycling. Besides recycling, the circular economy offers strategies to increase material efficiency and thus decrease the primary raw material demand. However, the potentials remain unexploited because circular economy concepts with a higher degree of circularity are not considered. The presented case study of an industrial machining knife illustrates how the production process can be improved by implementing various circular strategies. The environmental performance is analyzed by calculating and comparing the carbon footprint, the cumulative energy demand and the material footprint, and the material efficiency indicator. The results show that the implementation of the three overarching strategies of the circular economy - narrowing, closing, and slowing - contributes to a significant increase in material efficiency. The implementation also has a positive effect on the overall environmental performance. The circular production processes require less energy and resources and cause fewer emissions. Auxiliary processes such as additional transport routes are relevant, as they can reduce or even overcompensate for savings. These processes must be adequately considered and designed.