How to get started with life-centred design
Tips and tools for digital and product designers to start designing more sustainable, regenerative, inclusive, and diverse solutions
In a world that is rapidly evolving, it has become essential to adopt a design approach that puts the environment and social justice at the forefront.
Life-centred design is an emerging practice that seeks to create sustainable and meaningful solutions that benefit all living beings, including humans, plants, and animals. By embracing life-centred design principles, we can address pressing global challenges and create a positive impact on the world.
The problem with getting started with life-centred design is that it makes us look at the bigger picture, where our thing (product, website, etc.) is only a small part of a greater system, and how it impacts other lifeforms—and that gets messy, takes time, and can be overwhelming.
If you’re eager to make a difference and embark on a life-centred design journey, whether you’re a digital designer or industrial designer, here are practical ways to get started with life-centred design now.
Life-centred design for digital things
The main goals of life-centred digital design are to reduce the energy use/carbon output of your website/app, and to create experiences that don’t exclude anyone.
1.Benchmark the impact
Benchmark the impact of a website using Ecograder’s assessment tool — it’s super easy and the result gives you lots of ideas on how to improve
2.Brainstorm ways to reduce energy
Use the ideas from Step 1, and look at sustainablewebdesign.org, to start brainstorming ways to reduce the energy input/carbon output of your digital experience—start by:
- Ensuring all your images are optimised with a tool like tiny.png
- Minimise page styling and font variations
- Turn off auto-play on videos, and
- Use .svg format for any graphics and icons
3.Nudge sustainable user behaviour
Use behavioural design to enable and encourage sustainable user behaviour—start by:
- Identifying more sustainable behaviours
- Design ways to enable these behaviours
- Inform users about their more sustainable choices, and
- Make these options the easiest
4.Switch to Green Web Hosting
Switch your web hosting to reduce the carbon emitted by your web hosting.
Start by reviewing this list of green hosting options and look for those who use renewable energy rather than offsets, although affordability is important (After my own analysis and budget restraints, I chose Green Geeks (not an affiliate link) because even though they use fossil fuel energy, they return 300% renewable energy to the grid).
5.Embed accessibility
Start embedding accessibility into your work, it’s easy and after learning a little it becomes second nature… and makes a world of difference for people with different abilities—start by:
- Adding alt tag descriptions to all your images
- Use more than one method to indicate a text link is clickable ( e.g. use a different colour AND an underline)
- Ensure the page title that appears in a web search result page matches the title displayed once the website is loaded
- Check your colours have enough contrast for readability (use the STARK plugin for Figma or the STARK extension for Chrome or Bing, and 5) take the FREE edX Introduction to Web Accessibility course
6.Nurture Diversity
Design inclusive at all stages of design. Start by:
- Using images that celebrate diversity
- Include diverse participants in user testing and create personas of extreme cases
- If you don’t need to ask a person’s gender (e.g. Miss, Mrs, Mr, etc.), then don’t
- If you do need to ask a person’s gender, provide non-binary options, allow the user to enter their own term, and offer a ‘Prefer not to say’ option
- Designing for trans people resolves a lot of unseen gender issues in UX
Life-centred design for physical things
The main purposes of life-centred design for physical things are to reduce the raw materials used in the product and manufacturing, reduce or reuse waste, reduce pollution, ensure the ‘thing’ can be used by many and isn’t exclusive, and nurtures fair work conditions for all along the lifecycle and supply chain.
1.Explore the wider impact of a physical thing
Start by:
- Using Monika Sznel’s Actant map to brainstorm the environmental and social impacts of a product, object, business, etc. (‘Actant’ refers to an ‘impacted party’ or ‘stakeholder’, like a business stakeholder but also an animal or factory worker along the supply chain (The word ‘stakeholder’, however, does have a colonial history), or
- Do a Lifecycle Analysis of a product, which is just mapping the flow of materials from when they are extracted from the earth to how they are transformed into your product and how they get reused or return to the earth (try this free ecosystem mapping tool)
2.See things from a different perspective
Once you have identified an environment, animal, or invisible human most impacted, explore their needs by creating a simple non-human/non-user persona.
- Just research for 10 minutes about their needs, and then
- Look at your Actant Map again considering more deeply the impact on their needs
3.Innovate design solutions
Use circular design strategies to reduce the impacts, such as those from The Circular Design Guide. You can start by:
- Looking for recycled versions of your product’s materials or find more sustainable/less processed/less toxic ones at resources like wastenot.world
- Reduce the amount of materials, like this clever rethink of a COVID19 testing kit
- Explore ways to reduce and reuse any waste, and
- Try this Circular Brainstorming Workshop
4. Get the books or take a course!
Good luck and have fun!
More from Damien…
Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:
- Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
- Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design
Get practical with tools and courses:
- Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
- Life-centred Design Courses
- Life-centred Design Innovation Cards
Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.