Designing for the Unknown : Exploring Urban Mining as a case study

Abstract: The earth’s resources are limited; with the speed that humanity are using earth’s resources today, we would need 1.5 times of the earth’s regenerative capacity to compensate for what we use. Raw materials has since a long time ago been mined from the bedrock, which affects the earth in a negative way. If we could use materials and products that are circulating in our society, but are not being used and thereby considered as waste, traditional mining could be replaced with urban mining. Imagine what would happen if earth’s resources would be limited by laws and regulations in the future; mining as it is known today would not be allowed and there would be a need of resources that is gathered in another way, an unknown way. The world is constantly changing and this results in the fact that there will always be unexplored areas that needs to be defined and developed to be able to handle the changes in the future. Considering the fact that urban mining is such an unexplored field, there is a need of creating a process to define the segment in order to develop product/services within it. The outcome of this thesis is therefore recommendations for how a generic design process can be tailored and implemented for innovation development in undefined areas. The result is reached through investigating a development project, which focuses in the research area urban mining, as a case study and also by studying design processes in theory. The investigation is conducted with an explorative approach by observing the field and sub-fields of urban mining. This thesis shows that drivers and trends for urban mining exist, and that there is a future need to capitalize this market. The result also shows that the most important characteristics of the design process when designing for the unknown, is the fact that defining the research area requires even more effort when dealing with an initially unknown field, compared with known research areas.