Welcome to your monthly inspiration of tools, tips, and resources to start life-centring your design practice.
Choose just one tool or approach every New Moon and experiment with it for the following month, as an easy, no-pressure way of slowly expanding your design to be more life-centred.
This month's life-centred design mindset
When it comes to sustainability and inclusivity, designers and businesses are constantly hearing about what they should and shouldn't to do less planetary harm and more good.
And a lot of the time, we're presented with just two choices:
- Design for degrowth or green growth
- Work in sustainability or against it by working in the commercial world
- Design your product or website to be fully accessible and sustainable or you're part of the problem
But the world's wicked problems are complex, not so black and white, or this or that. Such binary choices force us to choose a 'side'. They pit us against each other and blind us to possible alternatives that merge the best aspects of both.
Tools and tips to 'Avoid Absolutes'
✔️ Align with decolonised global goals to design for degrowth and growth—When aligning your projects and businesses with global goals, explore alternatives to the UN Sustainable Development goals that take development and growth out of the goals, which allows for projects and businesses to choose whether they are supporting a growth or degrowth phase. For your own busineses, plan for periods of growth and degrowth for certain areas. See my article Setting global goals for your project for more information about this.
✔️ Take whatever design job you need to survive, and compliment it with your own life-centred initiatives, such as your own projects, volunteering for design commnities etc., all of which will add to your skills as a life-centred designer and prepare you for your dream role.
✔️ Embrace the complexity of the full spextrum of human experience instead of simplifying everything to avoid it. Design experiences with maximum inclusivity of ability, race, gender, sexuality, etc. For product's, explore their lifecycle and while you might indeifty many negative enviornmental and social impacts along the lifeycle, just choose one problem to work on as a start. A tip to working with complexity is to learn to be comfortable with not knowing everything and every detail.
✔️ Design websites to be as sustainable and inclusive to the best of your abilities and knowledge, with both a commitment ongoing learning and improvement. If you have a large existing digital experience that needs a sustainable and inclusive overhaul, start with the high-traffic pages, and make a plan for future improvements. Leave low traffic pages to last, or delete them.
✔️ Embrace openess and adapability—If you have to design for an absolute (for example, you need plan for constant growth), know that you can change direction in the future, that you don't have to become 'cultish' about one direction and 'stick with one side'. Grow communities and businesses that need it now, and innovate ways to degrow others that are growing too big and demanding. One way to do this with businesses based on physical products, is to have multiple product streams, so you can grow some product lines while you degrow others to let the planetary resources replenish for each.
✔️ Be Protopian—Develop design and business practices that embed constant improvements of sustainability, inclusivity, and regeneration (see our previous newsletter about being protopian)
Life-centred design gems
Books, articles, videos and more to expand your skills, knowledge, and planetary connection.
🎥 Natura Urbana
After my trip to Milan and working to help a spontaneous forest reclaiming abandoned industrial site, I've been more interested in spontaneous rewilding. Natura Urbana is about the Brachen of Berlin—rewilded sites emerging from war-time destruction, economic malaise, and geo-political division, these ostensibly empty sites evolved into laboratories for botanists, artists, and ordinary people seeking respite from the city. Today, however, these unusual spaces are fast disappearing. Natura Urbana explores the spontaneous diversity of plants in these spaces to illuminate the city’s complex history through the post-war period until the contemporary era.
Watch Natura Urbana
📱 Sam Bentley is planetary good news!
I love Sam Bentley's Instagram channel, it's always full of postive news about great work and innovations solving world problems
Explore Sam Bentley's positive planetary news on instagram
📄 Cities are replacing paving with plants
Depaving, or desealing, is about replacing as much concrete, asphalt and other forms of hard landscaping as possible with plants and soil. Since 2008, advocates claim depaving allows water to soak into the ground which reduces flooding, increases biodiversity, allows for more trees to increase shade and cooling to protect residents and urban wildlife from heatwaves, and may even improve people's mental health, too.
Read the full article.
What the Lab has been up to
🌳 Our first Life-centred Design Foundations Online Course cohort is completed!
Since the last newsletter, students of the first cohort for my Life-centred Design Foundations course completed redesigning their product businesses to be more sustainable, inclusive, and regenerative.
Redesigning fishing jigs
Laura Tahvaneinen redesigned the fishing jig product system to address the production and loss of them during fishing contributing to ocean pollution, including poisonous lead, with a concept focusing on home-made jigs using biodegradable materials, ordered from an app that also encouraged recycling and sharing of sustainable fishing knowledge.
Redesigning baby prams
Inspired by birds building nests for their eggs, Manuela Risch redesigned the baby pram to address overproduction and waste by using fungi mycelium for parents to grow the carriage of their baby prams as their baby grows inside the mother's stomach. Parents can choose between growing the carriage at home or visiting the Fungitarium which will grow it for you.
Redesigning in-flight meal packaging
Rebecca Dawson addressed the overproduction and waste of plastics used for in-flight meals—which end up in landfills and contribute to the growing problem of global soil degradation—by replacing plastics with a combination of compostable, reusable, and recyclable solutions. Rebecca also addressed food waste through the use of industrial-scale composting facilities to transform airports into places that reuse food waste and other compostable materials for use in and around the airport.
Combined with awareness campaigns for users and citizens, the students' solutions created systemic solutions for a worldwide reduction in resource use, waste, and pollution in three industries—airlines, fishing, and baby products.
Amazing work Laura, Manuela, and Rebecca! 👏 👏👏
Next LCD Foundations Course is coming soon
Learn more about the Life-Centred Design Foundations Course and sign up for updates for the next cohort
Keep learning and having fun :)
Damien Lutz
Founder of Life-centred Design Lab
