Abstract
Circular economy planning for the built environment is a wicked problem: data are fragmented, tools are siloed, and the goals of material reuse are contested. Those aspects collectively contribute to generating systemic barriers towards circular economy transition. This study targets this challenge by proposing the Circular City Twin as a conceptual open system-of-systems that enables shared inquiry and collaborative action between city and building scales. Drawing on second-order cybernetics and meta-design principles, the Circular City Twin acts as an architectural interface: a modular, scalable, extensible digital infrastructure that integrates cadastral data, parametric BIM generation, and semantic models to deliver high-granularity information flows about building components and their circularity- and environmental- metrics. We outline proposed artefacts such as a Revit plug-in, parametric workflows, and a modular ontology to illustrate how a designed platform can shift practice from isolated modeling to feedback-driven co-design, supporting systemic circular transitions across spatial scales and domains.
Keywords
co-design; integrated design; GIS-BIM; circular economy
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.589
Citation
Triantafyllidis, G., and Huang, L. (2026) Design as Interface: From Architectural Design to Circular Systems Design, in Simeone, L., Gray, C. M., Verhoeven, A., de Götzen, A., Bakırlıoğlu, Y., Zohar, H., Stead, M., and Buwert, P. (eds.), DRS2026: Edinburgh, 8–12 June, Edinburgh, United Kingdom. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2026.589
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Included in
Design as Interface: From Architectural Design to Circular Systems Design
Circular economy planning for the built environment is a wicked problem: data are fragmented, tools are siloed, and the goals of material reuse are contested. Those aspects collectively contribute to generating systemic barriers towards circular economy transition. This study targets this challenge by proposing the Circular City Twin as a conceptual open system-of-systems that enables shared inquiry and collaborative action between city and building scales. Drawing on second-order cybernetics and meta-design principles, the Circular City Twin acts as an architectural interface: a modular, scalable, extensible digital infrastructure that integrates cadastral data, parametric BIM generation, and semantic models to deliver high-granularity information flows about building components and their circularity- and environmental- metrics. We outline proposed artefacts such as a Revit plug-in, parametric workflows, and a modular ontology to illustrate how a designed platform can shift practice from isolated modeling to feedback-driven co-design, supporting systemic circular transitions across spatial scales and domains.