Enabling Design for Circularity with Computational Tools

Circular construction is a design task that requires new datasets and computational tools for matching supply and demand within an urban circular system. Material passports (MPs) contain detailed inventories of materials and products, as well as their specifications, location, and connection details. Circularity indicators (CIs) allow an assessment of a design’s environmental impacts with respect to circularity: the degree to which solutions minimise extraction and waste in favour of reusable, renewable, or recyclable resources both in construction and at end-of-use. Often implemented as an extension to detailed BIM models, MPs and CIs are presently applied in the permit and documentation phases. However, these metrics also establish parameters in early design phases, where circular design thinking and evaluation are most impactful. Circular construction consequently calls for a new suite of design tools that can be integrated into existing workflows, are applicable within the uncertain context of the early design phase, and ideally offer immediate feedback related to formal deliberations, structural considerations, material selection, and detailing. This chapter describes the importance of CIs as design parameters across phases with a special focus on recent early design developments such as the software application RhinoCircular.