The Life-centred Designer Issue#8

An arched, wooden footbridge over a waterfall connecting two forested cliffss

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 to slowly expand your design to be more life-centred.

This month's life-centred design mindset

A banner with the words "Honour Pasts, Explore Futures, Act Now"

Welcome to our final newsletter for the year!

I'll be taking a break from some LCD Lab activities to reflect on the busy year so far and to plan ahead.

So I thought it would be appropriate to make this month's mindset about thinking long-term, both in terms of what has gone before and what may come, to inform design and business decisions that foster more life-centred futures.

Tools and tips to 'Honour Pasts, Explore Futures, Act Now'

✔️ Honour Pasts

Use a framework like PESTLE (Political, technological, social environmental, legal, economical) to reflect on the drivers that have led to the current state of your project and/or business. Consider your point of perspective (your gender, sexuality, ability, power, age, culture, race, colour, etc.), then look for alternative perspectives of the past, such as those of Indigenous peoples, marginalised groups, etc., to ensure these perspectives are included in all ongoing conversations
Identify how you or your industry has damaged nature and vulnerable people in the past, and identify ways using your product design, business, profit, partnerships and/or influence to both stop perpetuating that harm and how to regenerate those impacted

✔️ Explore Futures

When making a major design or business decision, use a tool like the Futures Wheel to brainstorm indirect and unseen consequences
If you find potential unintended consequences and need to argue for change, you can summarise key insights into "news headlines of tomorrow" to help convey the possible reality of these outcomes and to get buy-in

Download both of these futuring tools with The Life-centred Design Guide Toolkit.

✔️ Act Now

Know your impacts—Use whichever tool is appropriate to map the wider environmental and social impacts of your project, product, and/or business (LCD Journey Map, Ecosystem Map, etc.)
Know your power—Understand what impact you can have, and what is your sphere of influence, whether it's product design, business design, partnerships, procurement, etc. Know what you can do or change without approval and what you might need approval for.
Know your tools—Explore The Life-centred Design Guide Toolkit and The Non-human Persona Guide Toolkit to match your skills and power with the right tools.
Take action—Implement what you can by default, and make it part of your default process. And use influencing tools like multi-media non-human personas to share any other insights and ideas that are beyond your influence to get buy-in from those in power.

Life-centred design gems

Books, articles, videos and more to expand your skills, knowledge, and planetary connection.

🚀 Making Futures Work
Phil Balagtas is a well-known futurist and founder of the Design Futures Initiative, a nonprofit dedicated to the advancement and education of Futures Thinking, and a global community of chapters in over 80 cities. Check out his new book, Making Futures Work, and watch his fascinating and informative introduction to speculative design.

🚀 99 Cent Futures
Founded by creatives Chris Woebken and Elliott P. Montgomery, Extrapolation Factory uses their own experimental, collaborative methods to explore democratised futures by creating hypothetical future props. They often embed their provocative props into real-world scenarios.

The Factory’s first project, and my personal favourite, ‘99¢ Futures’ began with a selection of possible future scenarios expanded into small stories. Related product ideas generated from the stories (‘Benzene Vapor Refills’, ‘Mars Survival Kits’, and ‘Triple-Nipple Baby Bottles’) were created via rapid prototyping and then stocked for purchase in a real-world 99¢ store amongst usual products. This guerrilla installation of a 99¢ store with a Time-Warp sale provoked conversation between strangers about the future scenarios triggered by these specials.

🚀 Future Scouting
Learning and experimenting with futuring actually led me to life-centred design. In 2014 I published my first science fiction book, Amanojaku, using my own rudimentary approach to collecting signals of future change and mixing them to create future scenarios. I also used my UX and design skills to design future technology and cities.

After my second sci-fi novel, The Lenz, I compiled my approach into the Future Scouting guidebook and toolkit.

Explore Future Scouting

Designing for the future allows you to align design with what's important for people and planet, so that led me to explore other 'values-driven' design, which is how I came across life-centred design in its early stages!

What the LCD Lab has been up to

🐝 More Than Human Futures Workshop
Working with Samuel Yu and Dr Susanne Pratt—two amazing academics from the University Of Technology Sydney (UTS)—we produced a research paper on exploring how futuring can include more than human needs. The paper will be published later this year.

To test the insights from the research, we developed and ran a More Than Human Future Ministries game workshop where participants became members of future life-centred ministries (such as the Ministry for Belonging, The Ministry for Well-Being, etc.). Using futuring tools with non-human personas from the LCD Lab, the participants designed future policies that nurtured the needs of people, animals, and environments in relation to their ministry's focus (belonging, well-being, etc.). The workshop generated fascinating discussions and helped us iterate the workshop for improvements to share with a wider audience.

Stay tuned for our published paper and more about the More Than Human Future Ministries game.