LCD Weekly Issue - 003- How do I…

Jan 22

Start with Life-Centered Design

🏔️ Words from the mountains

"How & Where do I start with Life-Centered Design?" is the most asked question during our webinars, workshops, presentations and conversations about LCD.

Is starting something new so hard? Yes and No! I identified three strategies in myself that made it easier to begin:

Embrace your Vulnerability
The Powers of Ten
Actionism

Embrace your Vulnerability

Starting to explore something new and experimenting in your own private space is relatively easy if you are open to learning new things. What is hard and scary is taking action & sharing it with the world. It makes you feel vulnerable.

I remember how scared I was before doing my first LCD Webinar. I talked in a small circle about Life-Centered Design, and now, suddenly, I was in front of people I didn't know, talking about something I was discovering myself.

I learned much from reading Brene Brown's book The Power of Vulnerability (TED talk). Once you step into the arena, all eyes are on you, and people will like and dislike what you do. Understanding that people's opinions about your work are theirs, shaped by their experiences and mindset, helped a lot. Do you know what is fantastic? Most people will like the new thing that you do when you do it with ✨authenticity✨.

The Powers of Ten

Words like sustainability, regeneration, positive impact, and system thinking are highly abstract concepts that take much work to grasp. Thinking about sustainability is overwhelming, preventing you from doing things. We get lost in the big concepts that the world runs after.

Using the Powers of Ten can help you determine the size of the sustainable challenge you want to work on. You can not simply solve the universal(10) biodiversity issues alone, but you (1) can work on biodiversity in your community(2). Start small.

Actionism

Stop overthinking and start acting. I can endlessly watch videos of Chris Do explaining how to become a better creative entrepreneur, but at some point, I have to tell myself to start implementing what I have learned and turn it into new habits. I reflect on what I have learned from Chris, and then I make a strategy that fits my situation and allows me to act quickly and start. Knowing I will feel vulnerable and I will learn.

If you allow yourself to be vulnerable, stay close to yourself and start small, you are on your way. For Life-Centered Design, this can mean something like:

Organizing a co-creation session with colleagues to talk about sustainability or life-centeredness means to the team and explore opportunities for change.
Go outside, connect with your natural environment and make a non-human persona.
Create your little passion project, which is a learning getaway!

🐅 LCD in the Wild - IDEO Nature Cards

One of the early Life-Centered Design contributions to the design world is the IDEO Nature Cards by Timothy McGee and Jane Fuktan Suri. I remember these cards fascinated me back in 2015 when I discovered them. My transition to Life-Centered Design might have unconsciously started with these cards. They are written more from a Biomimicry perspective about how nature can inspire design and less about an impact perspective. But the cards are fun to include in a design project and experiment with Life-Centered Design.

🪄 Inspiration- Low-Tech Magazine

I love low-tech solutions to seemingly big problems. It was with great pleasure that I discovered the existence of the Low-Tech Magazine when reading the MissRegen newsletter from Patrick Hypscher.

Their website runs entirely on solar power, which sometimes goes offline. The website is packed with Low-Tech Solutions, High-Tech Problems, Obsolete Technology and Offline reading when you cannot access a computer, a power supply, or the internet.

🔥 Hot in the school- Enrollment is opening this week!

It's happening! Our Fundamentals Course: Shifting from Human-Centered to Life-Centered Design, opens this Thursday, February 1st. We have 12 spots available and 4 scholarship opportunities.

This fundamentals course is your gateway to becoming a proficient Life-Centered Designer. Here, you'll acquire the essential tools, methodology, and perspective required for the journey. Explore how to address pressing climate and societal issues while integrating biological ecosystems, non-human personas, and non-user communities into your design approach.

The moment to take action is right now! Join the waiting list to be the first one to enrol! Check all the details of the course here.

👋 Until next Monday!

Jeroen.

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