Upcycling – a new perspective on waste in social innovation

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce ‘upcycling’ – a well-known term within design practice – to the field of social innovation. A mix between ‘upgrading’ (adding value) and ‘recycling’ (reusing) creates the word upcycling, which, in its simplest terms, is the practice of reassessing waste and transforming it into something valuable. In this paper, we ask: How does an upcycle mind-set and practice contribute to situated social innovation?

This conceptual paper seeks to combine insights from the fields of social innovation and co-design with the ideas inherent in upcycling. To ground the theorizing of what we term ‘social upcycling’, four cases are used to illustrate what upcycling practices look like. The cases illustrate the diversity of actors, activities and materiality involved in social upcycling processes. Concluding, the paper outlines a new promising area of social innovation and some practical implications.

Full text

Journal of Comparative Social Work 2016/2
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Article
Upcycling – a new perspective on waste in
social innovation
by
Charlotte Wegener (corresponding author)
Ph.D., Associate professor
Department of Communication, Aalborg University, Denmark
E-mail: cw@hum.aau.dk
Marie Aakjær (co-author)
Ph.D., lecturer
Centre of Management and Experience Design, University College Zealand, Denmark
E-mail: maaa@ucsj.dk
____________________________________________________________________
Keywords:
upcycling, innovation, co-design, learning, sustainability, social work
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
License.

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Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to introduce ‘upcycling’ – a well-known term within design
practice – to the field of social innovation. A mix between ‘upgrading’ (adding value) and
‘recycling’ (reusing) creates the word upcycling, which, in its simplest terms, is the practice
of reassessing waste and transforming it into something valuable. In this paper, we ask:
How does an upcycle mind-set and practice contribute to situated social innovation?
This conceptual paper seeks to combine insights from the fields of social innovation and
co-design with the ideas inherent in upcycling. To ground the theorizing of what we term
‘social upcycling’, four cases are used to illustrate what upcycling practices look like. The
cases illustrate the diversity of actors, activities and materiality involved in social upcycling
processes. Concluding, the paper outlines a new promising area of social innovation and
some practical implications.
Keywords:
upcycling, innovation, co-design, learning, sustainability, social work
Introducing the term upcycling
Do not throw anything away. There is no ‘away’.1
The purpose of this paper is to introduce ‘upcycling’ – a well-known term within design
practice – to the field of social innovation. We consistently take resources, make them into
valued products, and after a while, consider them trash and dispose of them. We value the
new, and not the old. A sustainable alternative to this sequence is upcycling − a word created
by a mix between ‘upgrading’ (adding value) and ‘recycling’ (reusing). In the simplest terms,
upcycling is the practice of reassessing waste or trash and transforming it into something
valuable. A basis for upcycling is the notion of sustainable consumption, and the main idea
is to revitalize old material by placing it into new constellations and by suggesting new ways
of using it, while at the same time, keeping its essence intact as a main value-adding feature
(McDonough & Braungart, 2002). Upcycling stems from the technological field and is often
referred to as ‘cradle-to-cradle’, as it seeks to break an environmentally unsustainable
production cycle of ‘cradle-to-grave’. The primary focus of this movement is how to deal with

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and reduce waste in the production of goods and technologies (e.g. cars, textiles, see
McDonough & Braungart, 2002 for further details). However, scholars within the field of
design are now studying related matters, and creating connections among the technological
and social issues of sustainability in the complex challenges of modern societies (Manzini,
2015; Manzini & Staszowski, 2013; Kimbell & Julier, 2012). Hence, sustainability issues are
expanded to include not only environmental matters, but social matters as well.
This trend makes the term upcycling relevant when working with potentially marginalized
groups, e.g. prisoners, emigrants, refugees, elderly people or unemployed youth - humans
who are often primarily categorized by deficiency and the societal problems they pose. The
preconception of humans belonging to certain social – unprivileged - groups is problematic
in many ways. Here, we want to stress the risk of paternalistic intervention – in which these
groups are ‘done to’, thus neglecting the value of relational and co-constructed partnership
and collaboration. Presenting the concept of upcycling in the context of social work is a way
to ensure a focus on the agency of all humans involved, ‘clients’ and ‘professionals’ alike.
In its simplest form, social upcycling is the act of recognizing and nurturing potential value,
and insist on dignity and creative expression as guidelines for human interaction. In order
to get a feel of what upcycling looks like in practice, the following short narrative illustrates
the essence of what social upcycling is all about:
Lesbos, Greece - Piles and piles of discarded rubber dinghies on the shore. A huge orange
graveyard of life jackets. Thousands of refugees in tents, many of them without their bags,
and with only a few belongings rescued from their dangerous sea crossings. Textile student
Floor Nagler from Amsterdam is there as a volunteer. She notices the material waste and
the human need, and starts connecting them. Bringing back 20 kilos of rubber material and
the story of refugees who are going to travel long distances without any bags to carry their
sparse belongings, she consults an artist friend. Together, they design a bag made from
one folded piece of boat material, held together with rivets and clipped shut with buckles
from life vests. Price: $3. Floor and her friend return to Lesbos and embark on a weeklong
bag-making workshop. One participant is Raida, a 13-year-old refugee from Iraq. She does
not understand English, but learns by watching how to punch holes and fasten the seams

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together. Finally, she attaches black life vest straps to the bag and slips the finished product
over her shoulders.
- We made the bag ourselves, she says with a big smile.
The project is called ‘It works’, and it becomes a part of Oddysea, a new Greek organization
that aims to make bags and wallets out of discarded boats and vests, and to sell the finished
products to benefit migrants. The workshop week has passed, but Floor and her friend leave
the patterns and tools so other volunteers and migrants can continue the project.2
This case illustrates several of the main features of social upcycling; a rethinking of material
waste is the starting point. However, during this project, the creativity and dignity of people
who are easily considered in terms of deficiency become the main drivers for change.
Expertise about textiles is needed to even see waste as a resource, but equally so are the
quest for simplicity and a pioneering spirit. The textile student and her companion have
launched an upcycling idea and a collaborative practice so cheap and simple that others
can take over and continue the partnership when they leave. The innovation is neither tied
to the initial participants’ expertise, nor to external money or technology. It is situated
innovation, based on local resources and needs.
In the following, we further explain the history and ideology of upcycling. We then look into
social innovation and notions of ‘newness’, which is traditionally one of the main defining
criteria of innovation. Third, we involve perspectives from co-design. To ground the
theorizing of what we term ‘social upcycling’, the paper provides five snapshot cases from
around the world, one of which is presented above. These cases are not to be understood
as traditional data we have produced and analysed. Instead, they serve to illustrate the main
features of social upcycling practices, from which we can tentatively deduce a concept and
outline an emerging research field. The aim of the paper is to sketch this field and invite
others into a dialogue, ongoing conceptualization and upcycling practices in social work.
Upcycling – a rethinking of waste
As mentioned, upcycling takes as its vantage point that which is old and the processes of
transforming and rehabilitating it. Upcycling therefore serves well as a lens through which
we can rethink ‘old’ and ‘new’ and reconsider supposed waste in its broadest terms. This

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‘valuing the waste’ mind-set is both a design practice and a political statement about creating
sustainable solutions to complex social and environmental challenges.
The concept of upcycling stems from the field of technological and industrial design, and
concerns the design for sustainable production and consumption. Upcycling counters the
argument that obsolete goods and waste material have no value once it is disposed of, or
that it must be destroyed before it can re-enter into a new circle of production and value
creation. As explained by Richardson (2011), recycling rarely achieves the aim of no waste,
because the reprocessing of discarded goods requires energy, which often results in a
downgrading of their constitution. Upcycling thus maintains the statement that not only
consumerism, but also recycling, need to be reduced.
Try Googling upcycling, and you will find upcycled houses made of old shipping containers,
plastic bottles or wood chips that are by-products of other production sites. Google on, and
you will find upcycled textiles for furniture and clothes, empowerment projects in the slums
and an abundance of ideas for your own everyday upcycling practice such as crafting paper,
plastic bags or old household items into lampshades, coat racks and jewellery. You will even
find upcycled Shakespeare (Iyengar, 2014)!
In order to further understand the upcycling practice and mind-set, we must look at its
history. The term upcycling was coined by McDonough and Braungart (2002/2010) in their
book on ecologically intelligent design, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things.
Upcycling is related to the ‘greener living’ phenomenon featuring the repurposing of things
formerly known as garbage. The mind-set of ‘cradle-to-cradle’ has seemed to catch fire
outside activist communities and eco-friendly movements. At the World Economic Forum in
Davos in January 2016, circular economy was a central topic.3 It is argued that there are
potentially large economic benefits for industrial systems in organizing for the re-use of raw
materials and components in circular systems.
When related to social innovation, the notion of sustainability must be conceptualized in a
new way to be meaningful. Sustainability is a contested concept with no universal definition,
and tends to suffer from a too narrow focus on economic-centred benefits (Banerjee, 2011).

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Here, we refer to Banerjee (2011), who defines sustainability along three integrated
dimensions: economic, social and environmental. Upcycling for sustainability is hence not
just a design approach. It is a mind-set and a practice concerned with the lifecycle of things,
emergent organizational forms and mutual efforts for change across social groups. An
upcycled object or process has improved eco-credentials, but it is primarily the story of
rehabilitation and the visible processes of re-valuing waste instead of throwing it away. As
stated in the introductory motto, there is no ‘away’, as permanent disposal is an illusion.
Waste ‘strikes back’; despite costly destruction, it does not simply disappear, but generates
polluted environments and health hazards. An alternative to this ‘getting rid of’ mentality is
the story of rehabilitation. This story can take various forms, but at its core is the idea of
sustainable consumption and - highly relevant to social innovation – a raised voice towards
an uncritical production of waste and devaluation of human rights. What makes upcycling
distinct from other kinds of social innovation is the incorporation of the transformation
process. Upcycled products and processes are not just ‘better’ than the original, they also
incorporate the aging process, telling stories such as ‘production with zero waste’, ‘small is
beautiful’ and ‘start local, but think global’ (Earley, 2011). Consequently, upcycling is both
concerned with re-assessing the past and paving the way for a desired future.
The subsequent case further illustrates how social upcycling includes a broad constellation
of critical resources, here among political recognition and support, voluntary labour and
philanthropic commitment:
Mpigi, Uganda - David Miiro is part of the Social Innovation Academy (SINA) in Uganda,
seeking to protect the environment and promote innovative mind-sets while empowering
youth. Through the upcycling of 15,000 used plastic bottles, David and a team of
volunteers will train their local community, focusing on disadvantaged youth, to protect the
environment while constructing a learning hub together.
The major beverage companies in Uganda are phasing out recyclable glass bottles,
replacing them with plastic bottles. Without a garbage disposal system in place in Uganda,
the bottles are burned after use with devastating effects on the environment. With this
project, David wants to raise awareness and show innovative ways of upcycling waste,

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including creating bottle bricks that can be used to build environmentally efficient houses.
David explains:
- We constructed the first plastic bottle house in Mpigi District. The experience changed our
mind-set of how to view waste, and we want to spread this awareness in a practical and fun
way to other youth.4
The Social Innovation Academy is turning around life stories of suffering into positive
catalysts of social change. Its unique learning environment empowers youth to become job
creators by nurturing innovative project ideas into social enterprises. As the case highlights,
the upcycling process is sparked by a sensitivity to local needs and an eye for local
resources, unnoticeable as they may be. It takes as its point of departure a situated
construction of newness and, at the same time, seeks to foster a mind-set of dignity and
belief in a desired future. Waste is therefore not solely associated with material resources.
In a new social sense, the rehabilitation of waste addresses at least Banerjee’s (2011) three
dimensions of sustainability: economic, social and environmental.
Social innovation - socially embedded value creation
To further investigate the context for upcycling, this section will outline some of the motives
from which social innovation processes are driven. Mulgan, Tucker, Ali and Sanders (2007)
argue that social innovation develops in ways different from business innovation, as the
driving motives for social innovation most often exceed material incentives and hence
‘include motives of recognition, compassion, identity, autonomy and care’. The demand to
find solutions to pressing social challenges in contemporary societies is evident, and the
interest in innovation in practice and research is rapidly increasing. Definitions of innovation
are multiple, depending on the specific research field, and providing an overview is beyond
the scope of this paper. However, many innovation researchers identify newness and value
as the two fundamental criteria for innovation (Høyrup, 2010). According to Mulgan (2007),
the simplest definition is that public sector innovation is about new ideas that work at creating
public value. But the idea of newness is problematic. New for whom and in which context?
New for how long? To help address this problem, several scholars point to innovation as a
process of translation, combination and re-combination. The emphasis on recombination
and translation underscores elements of learning, co-creation and transformation involved
in innovation, and not newness per se.

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As pointed out by Janssen et al. (2015, p. 1975), much research on innovation fails to
problematize the underlying descriptions of ‘newness’, and thereby ‘overlooks the processes
that constitute what is seen as new in the specific empirical contexts’. Given the cross-sector
challenges that face societies, here among implications of demographic and climate change,
youth unemployment and increasing costs in social and health care, it seems reasonable to
focus on sustainable innovation across domains, sectors and organizations. Accordingly, an
extensive part of the innovation literature addresses collaborative innovation across
organizational (involving different institutions or organizations), professional (involving
different occupational groups) or mental boundaries (involving different conceptual
frameworks or frameworks of understanding). Hargadon and Sutton (2000) refer to these
kinds of cross-boundary innovation processes as knowledge brokering. The term is used to
explain how successful innovators systematically make use of old ideas as the raw material
for new ideas across knowledge domains. Recent research also engages far more with the
practical conditions that make innovation possible, and not least the configurations of
boundaries (Aakjær, 2014) and differences that can prevail between practices in different
social fields and cultures (Tanggaard & Wegener, 2015).
Epistemologically, this interest in social innovation is in line with process thinking in
organizational studies, as presented in Weick’s (1995) work on sensemaking in organizing,
and a situated practice perspective, in which innovation is considered an ongoing activity
embedded in everyday work and learning (Brown & Duguid, 1991). Still, in order to clarify
the contribution that we seek to make, a short positioning in relation to social innovation is
relevant. Here, we consider in particular the complex social challenges of contemporary
societies that are not easily defined as purely public or private, local or global. Rather, these
challenges are characterized by their complexity and entangled socio-materiality.
Relating innovation to complex challenges underscores the necessity to consider
implications and challenges not solely in a technological-material perspective, but also in a
socio-cultural perspective. But what is social? And how is social innovation defined?
Following The Open Book of Social Innovation (2010, note 2 p. 10), the term social denotes
‘social problems and social impact as well as social motivations or intentions’. The British

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research organization Young Foundation has been a central actor to propose social
innovation as an approach to critical societal challenges (Murray, Caulier-Grice, & Mulgan,
2010). In their definition, social innovation can be:
New ideas (products, services and models) that simultaneously meet social needs and
create new social relationships or collaborations. In other words, they are innovations
that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act. (Murray et al., 2010,
p. 3)
From a socio-cultural perspective, social innovations introduce ‘new practices, intuitions,
rites, techniques, customs, manners and mores’ (Hochgerner, 2010) and ‘reconfigures
social practices and constellations of actors in such manners as to better satisfy or answer
needs and problems than is possible on the basis of established practices’ (Howaldt &
Schwarz, 2010, p. 20). Within research on innovation, the content of innovation is divided
into different typologies such as new processes, products, services, position, strategies,
governance or rhetorical innovations (Hartley, 2005), but more often social innovation is a
mix of several. Approaching innovation from the vantage point of workplace learning,
innovation can be ‘any content, but new knowledge, reconstruction of routines and
organizational innovation will often predominate’ (Høyrup, 2010, p. 148). Therefore,
innovation is closely connected with the perceptions, skills and behaviour of the involved
actors, and ‘can be seen as the embodiment, combination, or synthesis of knowledge in
original, relevant, valued new products, processes, services, experiences and
transformations’ (Høyrup, 2010, p. 146).
This perspective on social innovation accentuates knowledge-in-practice. It frames
innovation as contextualized and socially embedded value creation that is closely connected
to the development of knowledge and the competencies of the involved actors. In the
following case, socio-economic value emerges from re-assessing the knowledge and
competencies of actors formerly judged as unable to work:
Holstebro, Denmark - On their website, Code of Care5 states that they do not accept human
waste – individual, social and economic. Code of Care is a non-profit organization that works
strategically and practically with companies and public services to hire workers who would
normally be regarded as unable to work. Their slogan is ‘More care, less me’, indicating the

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need for a less egoistic and more inclusive and caring labour market and society.
Businesses who want to enhance their socio-economic responsibility can get knowhow and
assistance in making a business plan, which includes job descriptions to be undertaken by
people with disabilities or other challenges.
Code of Care is currently involved in establishing task forces. A task force is an active group
of companies, which in cooperation with the local employment service initiates
entrepreneurial activities to promote social responsibility in the local municipality. Each task
force is working with a local challenge - for example, combating youth unemployment, the
establishment of more flexible jobs or other kinds of inclusion of people with challenges.
This organization aims explicitly at a paradigm shift in businesses and in society. The
purpose here is to create human and financial balances by providing people with limited
resources the opportunity to contribute to the benefit of businesses and society. Although
Code of Care does not use the term upcycling, they explicitly address the core idea of
reconsidering waste and insisting on human dignity and worth. One more statement from
their website is: Every human being has value - let's use it.
Co-design – agency in networks
Another central field we can draw on to conceptualize social upcycling is co-design. Design
is primarily concerned with potential, or with ‘what could be’, and hence easily lends itself
as an approach to social innovation and upcycling. Two trends are forming in the field of
design at the present time: the orientation towards more complex challenges, and an
increased focus on co-creation. Among both practitioners and researchers, the field of
design is moving, and rapidly expanding, into new areas, embracing still broader questions
and concerns. There is a growing awareness of the complexity in today’s major challenges
and a belief that design is useful in shaping new sustainable solutions. ‘Socially Sustainable
Design,’ ‘Socially Responsible Design’ and ‘Design Thinking for Social Change are some of
the educational directions taught in design schools across the world, reflecting this
viewpoint.6 New strands of design bear names such as social design, service design,
human-centred design and transformation design, thus reflecting a change in the object of
design (e.g. looking for a new way to tackle social issues), as well as the methods and

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constituents of design practice. This development is caused by a change in design
challenges, with challenges no longer solely addressing ‘how to design a response to a
current issue’, but increasingly ‘how to design a means of continually responding, adapting,
and innovating’ (Burns, Cottam, Vanstone, & Winhall, 2006, p. 21). Hence, design
challenges are much more complex, interactive and relational, and ‘strive towards
meaningful and effective change, by reconfiguring resources in different ways’ (Kimbell &
Julier, 2012)
Design practice is no longer the practice of a sole profession, but rather to be perceived as
a collaborative endeavour and, thus, referred to as co-design. Co-design practice is a
collaborative mode of inquiry and creation involving people, space, artefacts, materials and
aesthetic experience (Telier et al., 2011). Theoretically, co-design research draws on actor-
network theory, practice theory and situated theories of learning, thereby concerning itself
with configurations and re-configurations of human and non-human arrangements across
both time and space (Ibid). Co-design takes its point of departure in concrete everyday
enactments, in which various meanings and a sense of newness and value are constructed
through ongoing, coordinated relations, actions and interactions (Janssen et al., 2015).
When we consider this in relation to social upcycling, co-design seeks to re-create valuable
and meaningful socio-material assemblies around matters of concern (Binder et al., 2011).
As argued by Janssen et al. (2015), this ontological point of departure as an alternative
vantage point may help shed new light on innovations as ‘representations of complex social
processes in which many interactions take place over time’ (Ibid, 1975). The approach of
co-design might then apply to innovation in social work, in which goals are often complex
configurations of practices and technologies – such as more effective services, knowledge
building, enhanced well-being or a more fulfilling life for citizens.
The movements in design described above can be summarized as embracing complexity
and the distribution of agency in networks. This reconceives of design as an activity
concerned with designing for connecting - people, purposes and resources. The following
case involves a diversity of people, purposes and resources which, combined, result in a
brand new neighbourhood:

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Roskilde, Denmark - Snake run is the most fundamental form of all skate park designs and
at Musicon7 as the idea of skating the California waterways is mimicked in the design of the
overland waterways. An infrastructure of concrete water canals stretches through a series
of hills and slopes towards three open basins that work as rainwater reservoirs during
flooding. The water drainage canals and the one large water bowl are designed for skating
and BMX. In 2003, Roskilde municipality bought an area previously used as a gravel pit,
landfill and a site for cement production. The 250,000 m2 area is severely polluted, with gas
and garbage deposits in the top seven metres of soil (Gudiksen & Lerche, 2012). The
environmental restrictions due to the pollution of the area, as well as new legislation on
handling increasing rainwater, set strict demands on the new infrastructure of the area. The
area is named Musicon, inspired by the former cement production company, Unicon, and
the Roskilde Festival, which is almost in the DNA of Roskilde. The manager explains:
- Some things ran in parallel. Hal12 – where the skaters are – started before the Musicon
secretary was established out here. Essentially, [Hal12] was initiated by a couple of young
guys walking into the department of culture [of the Municipality], saying: ‘We’ve looked into
this workshop and it’s just standing there empty - can we build some skate ramps?’ So they
got the keys.
The idea of combining rainwater drainage with skating facilities emerges in the encounter of
local city planners and members of the skating community, and develops when new actors
are involved: ‘So the thing progressed and we involved this architect. He is a skater himself
and the daily manager of Hal12 knew him, so they started talking about the project,’ the
manager says. Hence, the area was not left as a technical plant and a wasteland in dry
weather, but altogether turned into a recreational area with this skating-idea as the overall
idea. Musicon is now developing into a combined location for housing, cultural business,
education, a museum and shops.
Social innovation can be conducive in transforming and reconfiguring relationships between
public bodies, communities and private partners. In Musicon, the political motives and
resources are combined with the motives and resources of the local skater community,
which transforms the ideas of the usage of the polluted area into a combined technological
plant and recreational resort. ‘Useless’ land, ideas and intentions meet and are upcycled in
socio-material processes that address economic, social and environmental dimensions of
sustainability

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Conceptualizing social upcycling
Upcycling takes place through new combinations – be those people, knowledge, desires,
ideas, materials, technologies or needs. In each upcycling process, the combination is
unique and organically evolving, based in situated needs, skills and resources. The cases
illustrate that an upcycling process is rarely designed once and for all, and it is rarely the
outcome of strategic determination. By knowledge brokering, diverse elements create social
upcycling, which is therefore by no means completely new.
We have investigated what comes into view if we conceive of social innovation not only as
the recycling of ideas, material and practices, but also as upcycling in the sense of valuing
‘waste’ elements as the very basis for the creation of something new and valuable. As
mentioned, this entails a renewed interest in the ‘old’, that which may be considered useless
in a traditional appreciation of- and reflex focus on the new. Thus, upcycling puts an
emphasis on sustainability in its broadest terms.
The broad notion of sustainability inherent in social upcycling is related to an increasing
need to embrace the complexity and entangled socio-materiality of innovation. Overall, there
is a call for context-sensitive innovation discourses and practices. What we suggest here is
that upcycling as a concept and as a mind-set is helpful in this endeavour. Approaching
social innovation through the lens of upcycling adds a new perspective to how value is
created and dissolves the implicit categories of old vs. new present in much innovation policy
and research. Based on the cases, and with inspiration from social innovation and co-design
research, we have investigated and illustrated what a sustainable innovation strategy for
social work may look like: To capture and rehabilitate skills and competencies, ideas,
material, objects or practices from a wide variety of sources that might previously have been
considered not just ‘old’ but also ‘useless’. This opens new perspectives in studies of
innovation, among which contextual factors do not solely serve as mediators when
innovations are adapted in new contexts, but as the very basis of the new. Social upcycling
is a mind-set that opens up a situated perspective on both newness and value. Iyengar
(2014) notes that the act of upcycling is both cheeky and reverent. It salutes qualities of the

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past and at the same time seeks to create a desired future. Upcycling is a kind of nostalgic
futuristic innovation.
What might the upcycling mind-set and practice contribute to complex social challenges, in
order to rethink and rehabilitate not only ideas and things, but also human interaction and
collaboration? The cases illustrate how the upcycling of ‘waste’ elements can
simultaneously address multiple challenges, in addition to economic, social and
environmental dimensions of sustainability. The cases have served to illustrate the principle
of upcycling, and how the concept opens new perspectives on innovation in social work.
Upcycling can thus include a range of actors in their role as citizen, professional or volunteer.
It also includes the skills and knowledge at hand, as well as waste material such as
abandoned industrial areas, disposed goods and by-products. Social upcycling
competencies consequently involve:
 an eye for potential;
 a knowledge brokering mind-set;
 a willingness and boldness to act without a business plan, and
 the passion and desire to create the future and not just let it happen.
Social upcycling competencies and strategies
An upcycling mind-set constructively questions the obsession with newness present in many
discourses of innovation. However, the idea of value creation based on what is considered
‘old’ or ordinary is scarcely present in innovation literature. Here, we will elaborate on a
single term used in management studies, namely the abovementioned term ‘knowledge
brokering’ (Hargadon, 2002; Hargadon & Sutton, 2000). This term is used to explain how
successful innovators systematically make use of old ideas as the raw material for new
ideas, thereby stressing the role of interactions across organizations, professions and
domains as a core strategy to enhance innovation. Knowledge brokering encourages people
to ‘use their in-between vantage point to spot old ideas that can be used in new places, new
ways, and new combinations’ (Hargadon & Sutton, 2000, p. 58). A successful innovation
strategy is to hence capture ideas from a wide variety of sources, play with them and imagine
their use in other contexts (Tanggaard & Wegener, 2015) just like in upcycling processes.

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Hargadon (2002) notes that many definitions of innovation recognize the presence of old
ideas, yet this point is often downplayed in efforts to identify and describe the events that
produce revolutionary change. As a result, he states, dichotomic pairs using such terms as
revolutionary vs. evolutionary, radical vs. incremental and discontinuous vs. continuous are
common. Nonetheless, the problem is that these descriptors often confuse the idea’s impact
with its origin. With reference to Basalla (1988), he argues that ‘revolutionary innovations
often come from very evolutionary origins’ (Hargadon, 2002, p. 51). That is, the original idea
might seem insignificant, old or even disposable, but the upcycling process result may have
a huge impact.
In order to understand the processes of evolutionary revolution, he suggests that the relation
between old and new can be better understood in a ‘small world perspective’ (Hargadon,
2002, p. 53). Drawing on social-network theory, actor-network theory and ‘the small world
phenomenon’ (Watts & Strogatz, 1998), he regards domains as communities with shared
knowledge and schemas, inhabited by people experiencing their own domain as ‘a small
world’. For this reason, the creative act is the process of moving ideas from where they are
known (and maybe categorized as useless or trash) to where they are not. Sensitized to this
gold mining mentality, we can consciously connect to other ‘small worlds’, transport ideas
from one domain to another or scan foreign domains for things, skills and collaborators with
novel application potentials. Just like the upcycling mind-set, moving things from the
category of garbage to the category of useful is a vital part of creating a new commodity,
process or space.
Focusing on ‘old’ material and its reuse allows for a situated perspective on both newness
and value. Upcycling points to innovation competencies as the ability to look into other
worlds, reconsider value and envision future value. It carries the message that innovation is
not a matter of newness and value per se; rather, when resources move and combine with
other resources in other domains, ‘they become novel for their unfamiliar origins and
valuable for their established elements’ (Hargadon, 2002, p. 55). As creative human beings
we can all pick up and transport material and ideas across domains, and accordingly add to
the upcycle spiral. In this paper, we have sought to do so by drawing on different research
domains and combining them in a new way. As social science researchers and social work

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practitioners, we can do that all the time, whether on a small or large scale. All we have to
do is to be involved in partnerships and collaborations with people different from ourselves,
and seek to inspire ourselves and others to look for gold in the garbage. By continually doing
so, we can insist on creativity and human dignity as guidelines for the futures we want to
create.

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Endnotes
1. http://posters-for-good.tumblr.com/post/23043193776/dont-throw-anything-away
2. http://itworksshops.org/
3. http://www.weforum.org/global-challenges/projects/circular-economy/
4. http://www.socialinnovationacademy.org/
5. http://codeofcare.dk/
6. phd-design@jiscmail.ac.uk, on a discussion on ‘degrees in socially sustainable design’;
located October 2011.
7. http://musicon.dk

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