In the last chapter of the first season of the EnCircular podcast, we focus on design and designers. Specifically, we talk to the graphic designer and creative director Núria Vila, a benchmark for ‘sustainable design’ or ‘green design’ in Spain, which she disseminates and promotes both through her own projects and in talks, conferences, publications and courses.

Vila stresses that “scientists are warning about the climate emergency: in less than 10 years the situation will be irreversible. Seventy per cent of the environmental impact of any product is produced in the first phase: the design phase. In this context, designers have a responsibility. We are communicators and we can be agents of change.

If we take these values or principles into account from the beginning, the process becomes much more circular. Núria warns us that there is no plan B, that the only way out is to reduce, reuse, repair and, finally, recycle, because the consequences of the linear economy for our planet are irreversible seven years from now. We need to stop and think. To see the project from its origin at a global level, how it will be produced, how it will relate to the user and what life awaits it when it is no longer useful.

A trip she made when she was 25 years old to shoot a documentary for an NGO in El Salvador marked her vision of her work and her vital and professional goal: to develop projects that have a real social and environmental impact and contribute to a better world for everyone. For Núria, the circular economy is not a fad. “The message is getting through more and more”, she tells us, and, along these lines, it must continue to be built.

We are 100% aligned with her and, closing the first season with her freshness and warmth of ideas, encourages us to continue working and disseminating ‘in circular’.