In order to transform the economy into one that is circular, that recovers most materials through reuse, remanufacturing and recycling, these activities need to grow significantly. Waste management has substantially incorporated recycling as an end-of-life treatment but has still largely failed to incorporate remanufacturing and reuse as possible material recovery routes. This article aims to provide useful information to establish centers for urban remanufacture (CUREs), by analyzing fifteen existing initiatives that facilitate reuse and remanufacture by providing access to secondary materials or manufacturing tools. The study consists of a review of selected initiatives complemented with targeted interviews to fill in missing information. Most initiatives provided access to secondary materials (13 of 15 initiatives), and almost all used different manufacturing tools (14 of 15 initiatives). Besides their regular opening hours, initiatives were mainly engaged in capacity building activities, which were done through predefined or improvised workshops. Most initiatives relied on external support to finance their operations (9 of 15 initiatives). However, one of the self-financed initiatives is the oldest initiative in the study, operating since 1998. Based on the results and tacit knowledge collected in this study, a framework is suggested to serve as a guide for establishing future CUREs.

Waste What? is a card game, intended to communicate about linear economy while highlighting sustainable alternatives of local circular economy (CE) practices offered by grassroot initiatives. The objective of this article is to present the applied co-creative game development process and to show identified CE enablers included in the game. Based on the results, lessons learned and recommendations for future projects are formulated. The project that developed Waste What? used a co-creative development process with four phases: 1. Field Trips: That collected perspectives, insights, and impressions from local CE-Stakeholders. 2. Prototyping: Developed the game concept based on observations. 3. Testing & Design: Prototypes are developed into the final game by including the perspectives of stakeholders in testing sessions. 4. Dissemination and Documentation: The game was documented and published with an open-source license and disseminated at events. With an individual design of 110 cards, a game board, chips, and a manual, Waste What? communicates an experience of involvement in local CE- practices. In the game, players from two teams take the perspective of CE-initiatives. They are active in the re-use of items of the categories: Textiles, Electronics, Food, Furniture, Construction Materials and Bicycles. Players have several options, including selling, donating, storing, combining or incinerating items. The game communicates observed CE-enablers connected to people, items, and infrastructure. The study concludes that CE-games can communicate principles and people are interested in the approach. However, it is recommended to tailor games to specific target groups and plan extensive dissemination efforts to maximize its impact.

This editorial introduces the special issue Design Practices Transitioning Towards Embracing Systemic Worldviews, which addresses the urgent need for design approaches capable of engaging with the complexities of sustainable transitions. Contemporary socio-ecological and socio-technical challenges are increasingly understood as interconnected and dynamic, requiring design to move beyond linear problem-solving paradigms toward systemic, relational and multi-scalar practices. Drawing on perspectives from transition design and systemic design, the issue explores how design can operate within evolving systems by engaging diverse forms of intelligence, including human, ecological and computational. The editorial situates systemic worldviews as a synthesis of systems thinking, systemic design and pluriversal approaches, highlighting an ongoing epistemological and ontological shift in design practice. This shift reframes design as a practice of sense-making, mediation and infrastructuring, oriented toward enabling conditions for transformation rather than delivering predefined solutions. Across the contributions, designers are repositioned as embedded actors who work with, rather than on, complex systems, engaging multiple stakeholders and navigating uncertainty, conflict and emergent change. At the same time, the issue reveals key tensions and gaps that require further investigation, including challenges related to evaluation, scale, knowledge production and the political dimensions of systemic design. By bringing together diverse theoretical and practice-based perspectives, this special issue contributes to advancing design as a discipline capable of addressing the interconnected challenges of sustainability transitions, while critically reflecting on its own limitations and responsibilities in shaping systemic change.

This article presents Collaborative Material Workshops (CMW), aimed at identifying new use cases for commercial waste materials waste materials, which are continuously being generated and have valuable technical properties. With the assumption that such materials habe a high re-use potential, they are defined here as idle material streams. The objective of CMW is to identify scalable and feasible applications for the re-use of idle material streams and to communicate those results to commercial adopters. In cooperation with a local secondary material initiative and a project-related NGO, TU Berlin researchers have investigated the idle materials “printing blankets” and “aluminium composite panels” in two CMWs. Both materials combine valuable technical properties, a short use phase, and poor recyclability. The resulting two CMWs included 1) detailed background research, 2) physical material testing and 3) experimental CMW with material-related experts. With a special focus on the construction industry, the erticle discusses the barriers of identifying scalable and feasible new use cases for idle materials through the method of CMW.