Interview with Leafer Circular Design

Leafer Circular Design ("LCD") interviewed on Saturday, 11 May.

Could you please tell us about your experience as a designer, artist, architect or creator?

LCD : Leafer is an interdisciplinary design company focused on helping clients join the circular economy. This means we help them with strategic planning and business consulting before any sort of design execution. While our company has only been established since 2022, we’ve been working with many clients on a long-term freelance basis long before then.

How did you become a designer?

LCD : Leafer’s co-founders met at the National Cheng Kung University Institute of Creative Industries Design (NCKU ICID). One was an industrial designer exploring service design for the circular economy. The other was a communications researcher exploring user experience and web development. They united under the mission of helping small and medium-sized enterprises become circular businesses through system thinking, a focus on users, and maximizing material value.

What are your priorities, technique and style when designing?

LCD : Design is envisioning the result, and planning the process. It is about communicating a tangible solution to address the needs of a target client or user, and then clarifying the steps needed to achieve that. Our approach to design is to find the most efficient way to effectively help the client accomplish their mission.

Which emotions do you feel when designing?

LCD : We love the sense of achievement that comes from first, identifying the root issue of a situation, and later, developing a solution that creates value for all involved. We’re also invigorated by the challenge of possibly optimizing it further.

What particular aspects of your background shaped you as a designer?

LCD : Designers need to be able to zoom in and out of the challenge at hand. This allows them to think outside the box, while also creating fine-tuned solutions to meet the challenges presented. It’s also important to design from goals, rather than objects. Often an initial request (e.g., a new product) is not the best solution to a client’s actual need (e.g., perhaps an upgrade service to an old product will create more value for both the client and users).

What is your growth path? What are your future plans? What is your dream design project?

LCD : In the future, we hope to create a system for connecting Taiwan’s small and medium-sized enterprises to a network of circular designers. To achieve this, we’re currently working on a workshop to help designers lead businesses to reconsider their resource use and business models. We hope this can help more companies employ designers in higher-level design projects, ultimately creating more circular economy businesses.

What are your advices to designers who are at the beginning of their career?

LCD : To design is to learn how to observe, to replicate, and to improve something. Also, users are central to any design. A design without their needs and situations in mind is useless.

You are truly successful as a designer, what do you suggest to fellow designers, artists and architects?

LCD : As circular designers, we consider whether the value of the resources used are maximized. For example, yes, agricultural waste can be combined with plastic trash to create new products, but surely this is costly, creates relatively low new value, and will be harder to separate in the future! A better design might take a step back to identify why this plastic ended up as trash, find ways to efficiently extract value of each individual part before being “waste”, and involve a design that keeps future separation (value) in mind.

What is your day to day look like?

LCD : Work hard, eat well, and communicate a lot.

How do you keep up with latest design trends? To what extent do design trends matter?

LCD : Trends help guide our understanding of current market needs, but our work is ultimately geared towards creating designs that can withstand change and uncertainty. More and more businesses are realizing how unsustainable their business models are to themselves and the planet. Circular economy is a practical approach to becoming sustainable, with design at the core of making it possible.

How do you know if a product or project is well designed? How do you define good design?

LCD : A successful design helps the target audience envision a better outcome and includes tangible steps to make that happen. It’s system-driven, user-centric, and maximizes use of resources.

How do you decide if your design is ready?

LCD : We also always begin by working with clients to discover the true needs behind their initial inquiry, a clarification of the bar from which to measure a design. Following that we explore user situations, create proposals for further clarification, and revise based on the client’s feedback. Lastly, we execute our ideas, creating something that we’ll all be satisfied with.

What is your biggest design work?

LCD : We’re proud of helping a long-time client create a low-waste exhibition to showcase the accumulation of nearly a decade of experience and design cooperation. It was a celebration and sharing of the possibilities of a new material product we helped them develop, created from the reforming of discards from their current production. We look forward to helping them and similar others showcase the potential of new products and business models.

Who is your favourite designer?

LCD : One design we’re a fan of is Gogoro’s battery swap network. The design of this business model has successfully allowed their electronic scooters to infiltrate the local long-established gas-powered motorcycle market, and now they’re expanding in other international markets.

Would you tell us a bit about your lifestyle and culture?

LCD : We’re based in Taiwan, a small island which has seen many different eras from aboriginal pasts to colonization by both the West and East to military dictatorship to modern democracy silently fighting for independence. As a small country with few natural resources, economic survival has been about finding niches and creating services between raw suppliers and buyers. This often means that design is squeezed out of the business equation. Design in Taiwan has reflected this need for differentiation and heavily focuses on revitalizing products and services.

Would you tell us more about your work culture and business philosophy?

LCD : We’re an interdisciplinary startup, so most of our work is done in-house as a team. That said, we’re always happy to find new freelancers to work with on a long-term case-by-case basis. We hope companies will be open to letting designers work with them on higher-level projects, considering strategy and business model. A good designer can identify a company’s advantages, the value of its used resources, and create business models to make efficient use of resources to satisfy the needs of their users.

What are your philanthropic contributions to society as a designer, artist and architect?

LCD : It’s commonly quoted that the design stage is responsible for 80% of a product’s environmental impact. We as designers have the privilege of working with key business decision makers, and the responsibility of helping them consider sustainability. Circular economy is a practical method to reach sustainability, with design at the core of making it possible.

What positive experiences you had when you attend the A’ Design Award?

LCD : We’re grateful that the merit of our work has been recognized by other designers. It’s not only encouraging to us as a motivator to continue, but also helps us to communicate to others the value we bring to our clients.

Leafer Circular Design Profile