LCD Weekly Issue - 014 - What I have learned from teaching Life-Centered Design
🏔️ Words from the mountains
This week ends the 4th cohort of our Shifting from Human to Life-Centered Design course, which is a beautiful moment to look over my shoulders and see what I have learned. I identify five areas of learning that I'd like to share with you.
1. Do Begin
Looking through the lens of a tree or a forest is best done when you are among the trees. Doing the scientific research of creating a non-human persona is essential. Each time, participants share that it comes to life for them only when they immerse themselves in nature in the context of their persona. That is when they truly understand the impact of creating non-human personas.
But there is often a hesitance to go out and explore, immerse, and feel. This creates doubt about the effectiveness of these types of personas. The best way to overcome doubt and experience understanding the tree of a forest is to start.
Designer & friend Marcel Zwiers is one of our expert speakers in the course and shared the following quote by Brendon Burchard, which is very accurate for Life-Centered Design.
"Doubt increases with inaction.
Clarity reveals itself in momentum
Growth comes from progress.
For all these reasons, BEGIN"
2. Voices of Nature move me.
Have you ever cried over what something has designed? We ask participants to give their non-human personas a voice as the closure of their initial research, and each time, I get emotionally moved when they create these beautiful narratives from the perspectives of forests, birds, landfills, oceans and even concepts like curiosity or fear. Giving Non-Human Personas a voice is moving.
3. Life-Centered Design works
I see participants apply what they have learned in the Shifting from Human to Life-Centered Design course. For example, they either start advocating for nature in their organisations or create non-human personas in their design research for digital projects. One participant blew up our ecosystem mindmap so that her team could enact the organisation's ecosystem. I see participants hack our exercises and adapt them to their context. Life-Centered Design work! It finds its way into organisations' and designers' minds. It differs from the "fixed" design thinking process. It is more fluid, which allows life-centered design to seep into organisations slowly and naturally.
4. Life-Centered Design is for each type of designer
You don't need to be a human-centred designer or design thinker to learn and apply Life-Centered Design. You can do this as a graphic, product, service or UX designer, among other design types. We even have non-designers joining who are familiar with essential creativity and design principles, such as teachers, innovators, product owners, and sustainable and social entrepreneurs.
5. I need to involve more people.
During this cohort, I learned I must involve more people in the course. Running the school and course remotely from the Spanish Pyrenees is excellent. However, I see the need to invite education experts to help develop the course to the next level. I have missed seeing that before being tucked away in the mountains. I have a background and degree in Design Education, but this doesn't mean I should do this alone.
I am looking forward to seeing the final results of this Cohort at the end of the week. The waiting list for Cohort 5 this autumn of the Shifting from Human to Life-Centered Design is open.
🐅 LCD in the Wild - SNGULAR
A few weeks ago, we showcased several Spanish design studios working on Life-Centered Design. Today, we share more about SNGULAR in this mini-interview.
We are a tech innovation consultancy, an international team of experts in designing, developing, and implementing digital products and services. We offer our clients technological and methodological solutions that accelerate digitalisation processes. Our speciality is uniting the best technology with the power of people to help companies navigate disruption.
What is SNGULAR's version of Life-Centered Design/Planet Centric Design?
We think about Planet Centric Design as a set of methodologies, processes and tools to design products and services that don’t harm, or even better, regenerate the planet. We put special focus on the ‘planet’ part of the set because we are facing an emergency situation regarding planetary limits, and we feel compelled to do our part. In this way, we understand that Planet Centric Design (or Life Centered Design) is an improved, more encompassing version of Human Centered Design.
Can you tell us how you apply it in your studio?
The short answer is: starting from within. For the last 18 months, we have put a lot of effort into gathering understanding and training ourselves in those areas of knowledge—whether circular economy or system thinking—that is key for our work to have value and positively impact results.
We started by calculating our own carbon footprint as a team, with the double agenda of understanding this concept—and all its nitty-gritty—really well. As a result, we have been able to take (baby) steps to offset and reduce it. We are currently improving how we measure it with a model that we can share and extrapolate to other companies.
The best way to give value to this way of approaching projects is by example, communicating and sharing all the learning we acquire. So, we are working to understand and deepen these skills while designing tangible tools so that other designers and teams can incorporate this perspective. For example, we have designed sets of cards that help create a shared vocabulary so that more designers can bring them to strategic conversations about the projects they are working on.
We are not naive about the size of this task, and we believe in the power of the community. That is why we have created a taskforce within the Design team and a Design and Sustainability group on LinkedIn (in Spanish). More hands, eyes and brains can only contribute to making this better.
🪄 Inspiration- Wild Wonder
Dense Discovery, one of our favourite newsletters, is the source of this week's inspiration.
A rather seemingly random find: over a thousand beautiful hand drawings of plant root systems in the online archive of Wageningen University. Enjoy looking:-)
🔥 Hot in the School- Shift your TEAM to Life-Centered Design
Until now, we have helped individual designers shift from human to life-centered design. Now is the time to help Design and innovation teams in Corporations, Agencies, and NGOs shift towards Life-Centered Design. We have created the following for your team, and you are the first one to know. We will launch this on our website in May.
The one-day LCD Explorer to design and innovation teams that are new to Life-Centered Design and want to explore its possibilities before investing highly in it
The three-day LCD Deep Dive for design and innovation teams that want to learn how to include nature as an actant in their design work
A fully guided transition to Life-Centered Design for design and innovation teams who are ready to create impact with their design work and want to shift towards a regenerative and social design practice with life-centered design.
The one-week immersive LCD Offsite in the Spanish Pyrenees Design and innovation leadership teams who are ready to create impact with their team, shift towards a regenerative and social design practice and work on their leadership skills.
Send us an e-mail if you and your team are ready to explore how to incorporate life-centered design in your day-to-day work and create impact.
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So, that's all for this week,
👋 See you next Monday!
Jeroen
