LCD Weekly Issue - 040 -2024 Recap! Design Festival?

This year has been an exploratory one for the Life-Centered Design School. We welcomed six wonderful volunteers, and working as an international team at the school has been amazing. Together, we generated numerous ideas and tested several of them.

It's inspiring to see volunteers developing expertise in life-centered design, taking the initiative to integrate LCD into their work and life environments, and beginning to share their knowledge with the world!

This year, we expanded our community and witnessed wonderful interactions in our WhatsApp groups and during The Non-Human Persona workshops in the park. We taught at several universities across Europe and the United States, as well as at a school in Costa Rica. We introduced the Life-Centered Design perspective into a new Master's program in the Netherlands, collaborated with Design for Good, and gave a voice to the soil through the Soil Association, among other initiatives.

At the start of the year, we began our newsletter, LCD Weekly, which has received a lot of positive feedback. Writing it every week is challenging, but the effort is worth it.

In 2024, we learned that Life-Centered Design is really community-driven and that vulnerability is key to community engagement.

As designers, we always have many ideas, but for 2025, we want to have fewer ideas and focus on execution and tracking our impact. Here are a few new things that you can expect in the new year:

  • We are updating our website to give you a better experience and understanding of how to learn LCD with guides, tools, a prompt card deck (or something completely different 🀭) and a Non-Human Persona Guide (Book/ PDF).

  • We will develop and launch a train-the-trainer program that teaches you to facilitate a Non-Human Persona Workshop.

  • Release Impact Mapping Methodology

  • Consultancy offerings that help your organization/ team go outside and learn to understand your ecosystem.

  • Our new office is on its way... πŸ₯³πŸ₯³

πŸ₯πŸ₯πŸ₯πŸ₯ And we are keeping the best for last!

USANA DESIGN FESTIVAL!

We will be hosting the smallest design festival in the world, The Usana Design Festival, from June 5 to June 7, 2025.

This unique festival will take place in our village, with a maximum of 50 participants. These days, attendees can look forward to immersive experiences, workshops, and discussions around Life-Centered Design.

If you're interested in visiting the festival, participating as a speaker, or hosting a workshop, please leave your name and email address on the festival's page. We'd love to make this a community-driven experience.

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That is all from us this year! LCD Weekly will go into hibernation mode while we are on the Christmas holidays enjoying family time. We wish every one of you a wonderful end-of-year and an EPIC 2025!

Hopefully, next year, we can meet in person!

PS: If you are on the waiting list for our course "Shifting from Human to Life-Centered Design," you will continue to receive interesting content until we return. You can register by signing up here!

Happy outdoor holidays!

Jeroen and Marce

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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LCD Weekly Issue - 038 -Recap Cohort 5