What is Life-Centered Design?
Traditionally, we have learned to design for humans, specifically for an end-user. Adding a holistic lens to design, stretches the concept of the user or use.
Can nature also be a user of design? LCD includes a nature point of view, giving species, habitats & ecosystems a voice in the design practice. Empathizing with life on Earth doesn't solely come from scientific research and immersive excursions in nature, but these need to come from the wisdom of the indigenous communities worldwide.
As a designer, there is still much to learn from these communities. Life-Centered Design shifts our minds from designing solely for the privileged white to creating with the pluriverse communities worldwide.
What is Life-Centered Design?
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 and shareholders to adding value for nature, communities, and the economy.
The Design Framework
Life-Centered Design Landscape
Over the last couple of years, I have experimented with different methods, processes, and principles. If LCD focuses too much on tools within step-by-step processes, much will remain the same compared to today's Human-Centered Design or User Experience Design practices. Instead, we think of it as a Life-Centered Design Landscape where you move between spaces in a certain rhythm and pace. This is how you apply life-centered design to a project or question.
Three Spaces
We identify three spaces in the landscape. Depending on the project's needs and the expertise of the team you are working with, you can start in either of these spaces.
Understanding the Systems View of Life is the conversation space in which you learn about and establish relationships with the living system. The living system includes nature, people, and organizations. We assess the system's health and identify areas for improvement, approaching it with a regenerative mindset.
According to Josie Warden, having a 'regenerative' mindset means seeing the world as built around reciprocal and co-evolutionary relationships, where humans, other living beings and ecosystems rely on one another for health and shape (and are shaped by) their connections. It recognizes that addressing our interconnected social and environmental challenges depends on rebalancing and restoring these relationships.
A key element is empathizing with the system through landscape exploration, scientific research and imagination. Through scientific research, you can understand the biological, geological and anthropogenic health of actants in the ecosystem. Still, exploration, immersion and observation give you a deeper sensory understanding and allow you to empathize. Imagination and creativity will enable you to make & tell emotional narratives from the different actants, leading to defining a vision for systemic change.
Co-Design with Life is a co-creation space where we co-create and prototype life-centered pathways with nature and communities. Ingrid Burckett defines co-design as "collaborating, including and designing WITH people who will use, deliver, or engage with a service or product."
However, this definition does not include the planet, while nature also delivers and engages with services, products, and organizations and is often impacted by its use.
You can include nature in the co-design space by giving nature a voice. A representative of species, habitats or ecosystems, such as scientists or NGOs, can give that voice. Or you can create non-human personas and include them in the co-design practice. It would help if you first created ethical principles when using non-human personas in the design space. This way, we make sure nature really benefits. When we integrate nature, communities and the economy, we can create whole life-centred pathways.
Solutions or strategies are only sustainable and regenerative when we test the assumptions to understand our impact. We must experiment in the wild and prototype our design with nature and communities. We must iterate and adapt our design until we have our desired impact.
Bring Designs to Life is the regeneration space of Life-Centered Design, where you define and deliver values for nature, community and economy. You need to understand what success means for your project and how to measure this. How does the business and value model for your life-centered innovation look? Are you going for a social enterprise model and spreading your innovation? Will it be a circular business model, or are you giving your model away for free? And how does nature play a role in your business model? For example, the British shampoo brand Faith in Nature added nature to their board of directors.
Your innovation needs to live. Learn from nature how to do this and be responsive to changes and adaptation. Identify, create, and execute a regenerative strategy with positive learning loops, where the value for each element positively influences the other aspects of the system. The strategy describes how you release your innovation in the wild and how to communicate this. The regenerative strategy includes resource flows and impact journeys with ways to monitor and measure impact.