The Field Guide
To a Nature-Inspired
Circular Economy
An AI-supported
field trip
The Field Guide helps you explore a real circular economy challenge through ecological thinking, field observation, and Socratic dialogue with six research-based Guides.
You begin by defining a challenge from your own work: a place, system, organisation, or project where something feels unsustainable, extractive, wasteful, or stuck. You are then invited to go outside, observe patterns in living systems, and reflect on what complex, dynamic systems can reveal that conventional measurement often misses.
When you return to your case, you consult six ecological Guides. Each Guide brings a different function from living systems into dialogue with your challenge, asking focused questions, offering reframes, and suggesting areas for further investigation.
At the end of the Field Guide, you receive downloadable Field Notes: a summary of your journey, key insights, Guide consultations, and emerging directions for action.
How the Field Guide works
Step 1: Define your challenge
Choose a circular economy case from your own professional context.
Step 2: Go into the field
Observe living systems and collect ecological patterns through photographs.
Step 3: Look beneath the surface
Reflect on what is visible, measurable, hidden, relational, or difficult to capture .
Step 4: Return to your case
Bring this wider systems awareness back to your circular economy challenge.
Step 5: Consult the Guides
Enter into dynamic AI-supported consultations with six ecological guides.
Step 6: Download your Field Notes
Leave with a structured record of your insights, reframes, and possible next steps.
Meet the Guides
The Pollinator Guide
The Pollinator Guide focuses on the movement of knowledge, methods, practices, and capabilities through a system. It asks who has access to what is needed, how ideas spread, and where knowledge may be captured, enclosed, or prevented from reaching the people and institutions that need it.
“What I speak on behalf of is not any single organism but the act of transfer itself: the mechanisms by which something essential moves from where it is held to where it is needed.”
The Mycelial Connector Guide
The Mycelial Connector Guide focuses on connections, flows, access, infrastructure, and redistribution. It examines how materials, money, knowledge, responsibility, and power move through a system, where movement is constrained or captured, and who controls the channels through which exchange happens.
“I speak on behalf of the networks and exchange processes that move nutrients, water and signals between roots across a living system.”
The Soil Conditioner Guide
The Soil Conditioner Guide focuses on the conditions that allow circular activity to take root. It looks beneath the visible activity of a system to examine capacity, access, skills, trust, time, income, safety, permissions, space, infrastructure, and enabling policy.
“I represent the organisms and processes that shape the conditions and the foundations that make fertility and growth possible or impossible.”
The Decomposer Guide
The Decomposer Guide focuses on transformation. It asks what has been abandoned, damaged, undervalued, written off, or rendered invisible, and what would need to be actively broken down or reworked so that value can re-enter and support wider systems.
“I represent the processes that break down what has been abandoned, damaged or undervalued, and transform it so that its constituent parts can re-enter and support wider systems.”
The Scavenger Guide
The Scavenger Guide focuses on what is overlooked. It pays attention to surplus, informal, low-status, marginal, or hidden forms of value that may already be present but invisible to formal systems, reporting structures, or dominant ways of framing the problem.
“I speak on behalf of the entities and processes that find and use what is overlooked: the surplus, the informal, the low-status, the visible-to-some-but-invisible-to-formal-systems.”
The Restorer Guide
The Restorer Guide focuses on damage, responsibility, repair, regeneration, and justice. It asks who has been harmed, who has benefited, what genuine repair would require, and whether a proposed intervention addresses root causes or simply makes harm less visible.
“The circular-economy perspective I bring centres on damage, responsibility, repair, regeneration and justice.”
What you'll
leave with
The Field Guide does not give you a single answer. It helps you see your case differently.
By the end, you will have a downloadable set of Field Notes that captures your original challenge, field observations, Guide consultations, emerging reframes, and possible directions for future action.
These notes are designed to support further reflection, discussion, strategy development, or experimentation in your own context.