Many of the Design for Development outcomes which are unsuited to the users and their environment are based on poorly defined needs and preferences. Product-design engineers are trained to take the user perspective into account, but not to conduct ethnographic research. Thereby, they have limited time and resources to explore the user context. This paper describes the development of a systemic approach that urges designers to move beyond the investigation of product–user interaction and supports them to efficiently and rigorously explore their potential users’ context and their valued beings and doings. By using this approach, design engineers are guided to make informed design decisions and to improve the accessibility, applicability, acceptance and adoption of the technologies that they develop. To develop this approach, analytic guidance was derived from Sen’s ‘capability approach’, and practical guidance was derived from the domains of product design and rapid ethnography. Design teams using the Capability-Driven Design approach in the field indicated that the approach enabled them to rapidly understand participants’ culture and priorities, supporting them in design decision making and providing them design inspiration.

Materials are important in economies, business, innovation activity and products, and they have quickly become essential to maintain and improve our quality of life. The world faces problems concerning material supply, but these concerns are not translated into product design activity, even though history shows that product design policy can play an important role in finding solutions to materials problems. This paper has a focus on the role of governmental policy in ensuring material availability to the state.

The case of British WWII Utility Furniture scheme is one where consumer products were designed and developed as a response to severe material shortages. This action is set in the context of wartime conditions where the products were designed, manufactured, used and often reused over a long lifetime, under very stringent governmental control.

The control came from the government ministries but was designed and manufactured by the private sector. The furniture scheme was brought in to allow workers to have a furnished home to live in, eat and rest to allow them to work to help win the war.

Drawing on policy lessons from the wartime cases this paper makes a comparison of the WWII British approach with a European 21st century action plan for the circular economy, which raises important questions for policy development.