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
Sustainability is about having enough for each season, but being regenerative is about giving back to what we take from to ensure we don't just have enough, but that everything thrives in balance.
Being regenerative is about shifting from just taking from the planet to recognising that we form relationships with the things we take and that we should treat these relationships with respect and care, to become caretakers for what we use to support ourselves.
“Regenerative design is about creating the conditions conducive for life to continuously renew itself, to flourish amid ever-changing life-conditions... Regenerative design and development positions humans as co-creative and mutually-evolving participants in an ecosystem—not just a built environment."
— Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm
Tools and tips to 'Shift from taking to caretaking'
✔️ Heal the past and steer the future
- Identify how you or your industry has damaged nature and vulnerable people, and ways to regenerate them from this damage
- Identify ways to contribute to their thriving future
✔️ Collaborate
Collaborate with ecosystem partners, such as:
- Others with the same non-human—Share knowledge and resources with other businesses or industries with the same non-humans/non-users to collectively inform the personas, improve their health, and reduce your impacts
- Lifecycle partners from your supply chains—Get to know them, connect with them by sharing your personas to inspire, run a non-human persona workshop with them... or find more aligned partners.
- Other partners, such as Brand/Marketing, Financial, Affiliates, Additional value-add products
✔️ Inform and enable
Nudge user and citizen behaviour to do less harm and more good:
- Inform—Identify more sustainable human behaviours and inform users, your ecosystem, and citizens
- Enable—Make sustainable alternatives easier to adopt than unsustainable behaviours
Life-centred design gems
Books, articles, videos and more to expand your skills, knowledge, and planetary connection.
🕵🏽 Planet-centred Product Discovery
Fresh out of the 1st LCD Foundations Course, Manuela Risch shared her new life-centred rethinking of product discovery, with why it matters and LCD strategies to include. Love your work Manuela!
See Manuela's Linkedin post here
🍁 Enoughness in business
The LCD Lab defines three problems of modern design that have contributed to environmental issues and social injustice:
- Designing for only human needs
- Designing for only target audiences
- Designing for only human profit and constant growth
There are strong arguments that existing in a way that focuses on constant growth and development will deplete biodiversity to a point where all life may go extinct.
Earth Overshoot Day illustrates this overuse well as it annually 'marks the date when humanity’s demand for ecological resources and services in a given year exceeds what Earth can regenerate in that year'.
And there is the Degrowth argument that countries should abandon measuring their 'success' based on economic growth and focus on nurturing public services, care work, self-organization, commons, etc.
So I love this post from Marcus Feldthus about "Why small is beautiful" for business and its importance in the ecological crisis. Marcus talks about keeping teams small, why simpler is better, and how smaller can be anti-fragile.
See Marcus' Linkedin post here
What the LCD Lab has been up to
🎥 Watch a mini-documentary about my LCD workshop in a forest in Milan
As mentioned a couple of newsletters ago, I was honoured to be invited to Milan by Politecnico Milano University in Milan to collaborate with students to explore a redesign of the university's expansion into the nearby forest. I finally finished a documentary to share the wonderful thoughts and work of the students.
🧰 Life-centred Design In Nature Workshop
Drawing from my workshops in Australia, Portugal, and Italy, I've compiled a workshop kit for anyone to guide their clients, team, or class through a life-centred design workshop in nature.
🌳 Save $250 on our 2nd LCD Foundations Online Course—
Enrolment open!
Learn 8 powerful design strategies as you redesign a product and innovate a business to be more sustainable, inclusive, and regenerative.
🗓 Key dates
- 2 Aug—Enrolments Opened with Early Bird Discount, save $250
- 16 Aug—Early Bird Discount ends
- 23 Aug—Enrolments close
- 27 Aug—Course Starts!
Bye for now :)
Damien Lutz
Founder of Life-centred Design Lab
