Rather than a single product, EOOS’s most significant contribution to the Zumtobel Group is the development of the Circular Design Rules (CDR)—an innovation framework that embeds circular economy principles into the company’s product development process. Initiated in collaboration with EPEA Switzerland and based on EOOS’s fifteen years of experience in lighting design, the rules translate cradle-to-cradle principles into a practical evaluation tool for luminaire design.

The Circular Design Rules assess products across three interconnected areas: Circular Sourcing, Circular Design, and Circular Systems. A four-level scoring system supports decision-making throughout the development process, encouraging the use of healthy and recycled materials, designs that can be repaired, upgraded and disassembled, and systems that enable reuse, remanufacturing and high-quality recycling. The Vivo II retail spotlight and Artelea free-standing luminaire served as pilot projects for testing and refining the methodology.

Further developed within the Zumtobel Group, the Circular Design Rules were introduced in 2021 as the company’s standard innovation tool and have since been applied to all new product developments, demonstrating how design can drive systemic change beyond individual products.