Life-Centered Design in Action - Creating a Voice for Soil

In 2024, we collaborated with Chloe Smee from the Soil Association to create a voice for soil within the organisation. The Collective Imagination Practice Community supported this project.

In this blog Chloe and I reflected about our collaborations and the impact of co-creating Non-Human Personas for Soil in the Soil Association

Our motivations — Chloe’s reflections

It is estimated that more than half of all Earth's species live in the soil. Humans are dependent on the soil for 95% of our food production. But we are losing fertile top soils at an alarming rate.

The Soil Association (UK) advocates for food and farming practices that protect and enhance this vital element of our life support system and in 2024, we collaborated with the Life Centred Design School (España) to strengthen our advocacy, by creating a voice for soil.

If we gave this writhing, life-giving ecosystem a voice, what would it say to us and how would it sound? And how could this voice support food producers and food citizens to better connect with the central role of this vital component of our planet?

Working together, we decided to explore how the methods celebrated by the Life-Centered Design School could be applied within an organisation to strengthen the voice of the non-human. We wanted to test the will and the space that exists for imagination practice, and how experiential workshops that connect us to nature can enhance our creative muscle and broaden our mindsets. The Soil Association’s work is vital, urgent and multifaceted; but sometimes that sense of urgency prevents the spaciousness that allows for more creative, ambitious thinking.

From the first conversation with Jeroen, I sensed that spark — he understood the urgency and the opportunity.

Through our collaboration we’ll be applying to soil the approaches embraced by the Life-Centered Design School: elevating the voice of nature through the immersive creation of non-human personas. We will experiment with different ways of creating and sharing the voices of nature so Soil Association stakeholders can experience soil differently. Through the Soil Association’s policy and practice work we’ll explore how this tool for imagination could be applied to create new ways of thinking and working.We’re excited to sharing this process with the Collective Imagination Practice Community through a compact playbook and to learn from the work of other CIPC creatives

Life-Centered Design is an actionable design approach that gives designers and other creatives the mindset, opportunity and ability to include all life forms in their work and advocate for biological ecosystems and invisible communities. LCD transitions from creating value for the end user & shareholders towards adding value for nature, communities and the economy.”

Before we can give nature a voice we need to understand to what purpose we want to do this. In our collaboration it was quickly clear that we wanted to connect the voice for soil with as many different departments as we could within the organisation. It is not just about giving Soil a voice but creating a way for a marketeer, a funding manager or a policymaker to have a conversation with Soil. By enabling these conversations, the aim is to create a stronger identity with Soil within the organisation — and to catalyse this stronger identity in our work in the wider world.

Leading up to the immersive workshop we discussed how we could generate the greatest impact for Soil with the time and resources we had available. We choose to first give a Non-Human Persona workshop to a diverse group of representatives across the Soil Association and empower them as advocates for Soil. We agreed to generate a tangible output (a Voice for Soil Playbook) that all employees of the Soil Association could use to enhance their empathy with Soil and integrate that voice into their work.

The Workshop — Jeroen’s reflections

In our experience nature is hardly on top of mind in our day to day (office) work even if you work in the sustainability space, unless you work physically in nature. So that is why we alway start with bringing nature into our minds from the get go.

We kicked-off the workshop with exploring one question with our Scope & Focus exercise:

“How do we bring soil health into the consumption decisions of people in every day life?”

This Scope & Focus exercise challenges us to discuss this question with (a) only Nature in mind and then (b) with Humans in mind. By separating these categories we are forced to think about the relationship with and the impact on nature when you answer the question. This catalyses a mindset shift.

After this exercise we walked to Castle Park, Bristol to create Non-Human Personas from the Soil in the park. In groups of 3 participants we spent 1,5 hour outside exploring our Non-Human Persona Field Guide. This guide leads you to a series of design research questions exploring needs and challenges of the non-human (soil). Through this, we delve into the context and are invited to create a visual journal and an empathic story through the perspective of the non-human persona. This storytelling exercise is where the mindset shift, the empathy and the imaginative practice really starts to take shape.

We closed of the session by asking “How might this voice of soil land with one of our audiences?” and “What could help your voice of soil to land successfully?”

A non-human persona workshop in itself is a great activity, but we want to make sure that the outcomes get used within the organisation. Asking these questions helped to integrate the imagination practice with the return to the desk, and to make the learnings applicable. It also encouraged some personal commitment and accountability.

Life-Centered Design is not an approach that brings in a fixed new design process. It is about shifting your mindset and thinking beyond the single user — moving towards an holistic perspective of your designed context. Soil is an ancient kin in our life, deserving a longlasting and symbiotic relationship with us humans.

The ripples of the work — Chloe’s reflections

Soil in a jar — a ‘boundary object’ incorporated to retain focus on soil in the office environment

Our collaboration spanned three months, and the practical workshop, just one afternoon. Despite the brevity of the collaboration, it has stirred something in the substrate of our minds — and, we think, the Soil Association. We were wowed by the speed with which our collaborators across the Soil Association dived into the practice: they organically embraced metaphor and deep, long-time thinking as a way to connect with and communicate for soil.

Soil as a night club.

Soil as a community.

Soil as a witness.

Soil as a caregiver.

Soil as a galaxy.

Both metaphor and long-time thinking are vital, life-giving parts of imagination practice — the experience of this workshop suggests to us that even short, immersive bursts of imagination practice have the potential to stimulate new mindsets. Thinkers such as Geoff Mulgan (2020) and Phoebe Tickell (2022) have made a powerful case for imagination practice being essential for building towards radical futures; creating the capacity for this within large organisations can feel an intimidating prospect. Our brief activity underlines the potential impact of interventions that give actors the experiences, tools and structures to support them to make motivated, directional, positive change towards regenerative futures. This point has been made by many systems thinkers, including Bill Sharpe, quoted here: “(when deciding where to act for a regenerative future), focus on strategic niches, where actors can enrol themselves into action and progressively enrol others.” (private communication, but see this example for 3Horizons tools in practice). If we can focus our imagination practice on fecund niches and build motivation, the space for metaphor and long-time thinking has the potential to ripple outwards. Short, immersive bursts of imagination practice feel like an important complement to structures and practices in sustainability organisations.

Back at Soil Towers (or Spear House, the Soil Association’s HQ in Bristol), the concentric ripples are being felt. The initial participants are ambassadors for this new mindset — exploring the approach by speaking from the point of view of soil at staff gatherings; running team workshops to explore the approach more broadly. Ideas about a campaign with a food retailer to play on the idea that the soil shapes the flavour and personality of our horticultural produce; ideas about advocating for soil in land use disputes. We’ve cleaved open a space for non-human voices in our workspaces and organisational culture: and we’re excited to see those ripples grow.

Authors:
Chloe Smee - Soil Association
Jeroen Spoelstra - Life-Centered Design School