LCD Weekly Issue - 042- Voice of Nature within Organizations
⛰️ Words from the mountains
Last week, Chloe Smee from the Soil Association and I presented our collaborative work on bringing the Voice for Soil into the Soil Association during the two-year Collective Imagination Practice Community recap. It was a great way to end a project that aimed to bring the voice of nature into the organization's hearts, minds and thoughts.
Many of us rarely consider nature during a typical workday. As someone who represents non-human personas, I, too, find that nature isn't always at the forefront of my thoughts. However, I've trained myself to be more aware of nature in my work.
Based on the insights we've gained from the Voice for Soil project, I would like to share some steps you can take to help your team and organization incorporate a perspective that values nature.
1. Start by finding a few allies within your organization who want to enhance the impact of their work and are concerned about climate change. It would be beneficial if these allies come from different departments and specializations.
2. Organize a small design session to identify the key species, habitats, or resources that your organization affects. You can utilize our Ecosystem Mindmap for this purpose. For the Soil Association, it was clear that the key focus was SOIL. For a digital agency, it could be the WATER used to cool their data centers.
3. Once you have identified one or more key species, habitats, or resources, arrange a non-human persona workshop with 15-20 colleagues from various departments within your organization. Chloe successfully invited people from different teams.
4. Choose an outdoor location where you can connect with and immerse yourself in the key being(s) you want to create a persona for during the workshop. For the Soil Association, we found a park near their Bristol office, which worked well.
5. Do the workshop! Using our Non-Human Persona Guide, you can effectively create an emotional persona and narrative surrounding the key being in just 1.5 hours in small groups of 3 or 4 participants. You can later expand on this persona and story through additional research and immersion. Conclude the exercise by sharing the emotional narratives developed by each group.
6. To empower participants to become non-human persona advocates within their teams, engage in a brainstorming session at the end of the workshop. Discuss how the persona might resonate with your team/audience and consider what could facilitate its successful integration.
7. Create a playbook or toolkit tailored to your organization's context that these new advocates can use to facilitate non-human persona workshops within their own teams, promoting the voice for nature even further.
8. Follow up with participants to see where they might need additional support.
If you want to know more about the Soil Association case study, please read Chloe's blog. If you want to learn how to create a Non-human persona yourself, check out our on-demand course
🐅 LCD in the Wild: Collective Imagination Practice Community
Communities are needed more than ever. Today, we share an active and vibrant community: the Collective Imagination Practice Community which we mentioned above.
"We are a meeting point for collective imagination practitioners around the world. We organize many places for practitioners to gather, learn and practice in community, including a programme of open activities, a whatsapp community, a medium blog, a Practice Fund (that distributes micro-grants of £3k or less to seed and spread collective imagination), 'Huddles' (aka peer learning journeys) and a 'Seed Library' (a collection of activities and projects to inspire your practice)."
Our Non-Human Persona activity is in the Seed Library. We encourage you to use it in your project. If you have any questions or comments, please reply to this email.
🔥 Hot in the School: Online Fundamentals Course
Our course, Shifting from Human to Life-Centered Design, is blooming! Welcome Spring with fresh and new energy! Cohort 6 will run from March 7 to April 18, 2025.
Join a beautiful community of worldwide participants and learn a more sustainable, conscious and inclusive way of working.
Enrollment will open next week, so be sure to join our waiting list! Where you will get priority enrollment and access to the course.
"I highly recommend this course! It's important, relevant, and needed and I believe that everyone can take something valuable away from it. It challenged me to think differently and it taught me how to shift my own design process. I am walking away from the course as a more holistic designer with life at the center."
Taylor Kaus, Greenpeace.
Life-Centered design gives you the mindset and skills to include all life forms in your work and advocate for biological ecosystems and invisible communities.
What's in for you? 💚
- 7 interactive & live online sessions
- 1 individual coaching session
- Online learning environment
- LCD Tools & Guides
- International Whatsapp Community
- Certificate of Completion
You can sign up for our waiting list here :)
Free Webinar:
Are you a designer, a design or an innovation lead? Then, this webinar is for you!
What if your new design client is an ancient glacial lake? How might we design for a future where our products, services and businesses protect and regenerate biodiversity on Earth instead of destroying it?
Join us on Thursday, February 6, from 3 - 4 pm CET / 9 -10 am EST.
See you next Monday,
Jeroen and Marce
