Designing the Failure for Successful Design

Circularity is a fundamental aspect of sustainability. In the present day the term often refers to the practice of incorporating waste material in new products, but it seems inevitable that the next step in this direction will require a radical change in the take-make-waste cycle towards a more sustainable make-recycle-make. With circular economy as a paradigm to design objects or services, maximizing sustainability and maintaining economical viability, the management of the end of life is a designer's duty, even more in our times where sustainability is often mandatory. Failure Mode Evaluation and Analysis, or FMEA, which is normally used to assess the effects of a part, tangible or intangible, failure on the system of reference, provides an important tool to foresee potential risks and compare them, presenting the opportunity to make crucial design choices early. By using a multidisciplinary approach the designer can borrow engineering practices such as FMEA to assess the system situation from a point of view from where the single elements can be compared and subsequently be analyzed and compared against the others to sort out problems in the early state of the project. This concept, applied to the sustainability aspect in the light of circular economy, would therefore give to the designer an idea about how a practice or a product can fit in the system not only in the moment of use, but also when it ceases its primary functions. In a complex system such as a cruise ship where a large community of people live in an isolated, heavily controlled environment this conpect would be extremely important, since the designer has to provide adequate management of the resource onboard in a sustainabile manner, towards reaching the objective of a zero-emission cruise industry by the year 2050. Therefore, it's important to define accurately the quantity and quality of material and energy flows using a common language. By applying the FMEA methodology adapted to the circular economy framework with sustainability in mind, the designer could highlight the most urgent sustainability issues and look for solutions with a positive feedback on the overall system and those to which the cruise ship connects to, doing is not just a failure mode effect and analysis research but more of a reaction mode effect and analysis. This scenario of improvement of the cruise ship system as a whole whitin a systemic design framework can be explored by developing a study on particular cases related to marine cruise industry where elements of common use aboard will be analysed and compared using this "RMEA" method to highlight the where criticalities are located and how they affect the system, thus operating changes to achieve desired favourable results in term of sustainability while maintaining profitability for the operating company operating, therefore empowering the network of actors revolving our case studies on the fight against climate change and environmental protection.