Celebrating our 1 year anniversary

Written By Jeroen Spoelstra

Last year, we had a crazy idea to share our knowledge of Life-Centered Design with other professionals. After two years of researching, studying, developing our frameworks, and talking to many people, we realized the need for a school where designers and other creative professionals could learn and experience how to design holistically. People constantly ask, "How do I start with Life-Centered Design?" and "Can you teach me how to implement LCD?"

The Life-Centered Design School has now turned ONE year old. We would like to thank everyone who supported us during this exciting first year. We did a lot of experiments to figure out how to create a school that caters to the needs of designers and other creative professionals.

Here are some highlights of our first year:

  • We organized five webinars that had 442 people signing up.

  • Our three Shifting from Human to Life-Centered Design cohorts had 24 designers joining us.

  • Five amazing leaders participated in our very first retreat in Usana.

  • We had 115 curious minds joining our email course.

  • Our Non-Human Persona Online Course had ten nature-loving designers going through it in the first month of its release, early November.

  • We created a Life-Centered Design Guide to Slow Down, purchased by 84 creatives who wanted to slow down their design process.

  • We co-hosted a 3-day retreat with Phil Balagtas for 30 Master students from Elisava.

  • We co-hosted a 3-day Life-Centered Design event in Toronto with Ian Chalmers and the Brookfield Sustainability Institute/ George Brown College for 25 students and professionals.

  • Forty people joined our Non-Human Persona workshop at the Fixing the Future festival in Barcelona.

  • Our Slack Community of 35 is slowly growing and becoming more active.

  • Participants came from Kenya, Turkey, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada, Colombia, Peru, Italy, Pakistan, The Netherlands, Germany, Costa Rica, India and Portugal

  • We released our Life-Centered Design framework.

During 2023, individuals and groups created at least 52 Non-Human Personas in one of our courses, workshops, and retreats.

What does the future of the school hold?

In 2024, we will continue with what worked and improve upon it. So, you can expect:

What's new for 2024:

  • Release one more on-demand course (Very soon).

  • Activate our SLACK Community.

  • Organize Design Camping in the Spanish Pyrenees.

  • And a few more ideas are slowly growing in our minds and souls.

We hope to see you next year! And we would love to have you become part of the school!

If you want to join our last free webinar, click below! We will be giving each participant a special gift!

author: Jeroen Spoelstra
images: Jeroen Spoelstra, Ian Chalmers, Pedro Montenero

Jeroen Spoelstra

I am a passionate designer and mountain biker focusing on bringing people forward using a human centered approach. As a designer you could call what I do Social Design, but nowadays there are hundreds of different design names. So for me I am a designer and try to be humble to the world. I like solving issues together with other people in co-design and I love helping people reach there goals.

I find inspiration in mountain biking, traveling and in my current home the Spanish Pyrenees. I use sports, traveling and being outside to get inspired for my work as a designer.

Design to me is constantly shitifing between making meaningful products to creating impactful and real solutions/ approaches/ business that can make a difference.

The Design profession shouldn’t solely be reserved for the designer (in developed world), but for everyone! I design for impact and help people bring out their little designer in himself or herself. I am not saying everyone should become a designer, but I do think people can use a little bit of design to help themselves forward in their personal/ professional life.

https://www.unbeatenstudio.com
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