Five steps.
One closed loop.
Circular design isn’t linear. Neither is our engagement. Every step feeds the next — and the last step feeds the first.
We spend time in the community. We follow material flows. We map the whole system.
Ethnography, material flow mapping, stakeholder interviews. Waste is almost never where you think it is — before we design anything, we map where it actually lives.
A tight, testable design brief. Not "reduce waste" — but a specific target with a metric.
HMW brief, metrics & targets, success criteria — signed off with the community and the funder before any prototype is built.
Makerthons, rapid prototypes, service blueprints — always with the people who’ll run the thing.
If the community can’t build, maintain and repair the intervention themselves, we haven’t finished designing it yet.
A live, funded pilot on the street it's meant to serve.
We measure resource, revenue and relationship — a circular business no one loves isn’t circular for long.
The operating model goes to a local team. The playbook is published openly. Then we start the next loop.
Playbook, training, open documentation. Nothing important lives on our servers.
Questions we get a lot.
Who funds your community projects?+
A mix: philanthropic funders (IKEA Foundation, What Design Can Do, WWF Kenya), retained corporate advisory work, and increasingly the circular businesses we help launch. We publish our funder mix openly in every impact report.
Do you only work in Nairobi?+
No — our base is Nairobi and most of our long-term community work is in Kenya, but we run advisory and lab engagements across East Africa and remotely with global partners.
Can we book a single workshop, without a full engagement?+
Yes. Two-to-five-day labs and one-off keynotes are self-contained. We only insist on the fuller engagement when a client wants a live prototype in a community, because that needs time to do responsibly.
How do you measure impact?+
Resource, revenue and relationship: what stayed in the loop, what livelihoods it created, and what changed in the community’s own capacity to run the intervention without us.
Are your playbooks really open?+
Yes. Every completed community project is documented as an open playbook a local team can pick up and run. We keep proprietary only client-confidential parts of advisory engagements.