We did a lot of life-centred design in 2024!

2024 was a year of adventures for the Life-centred Design Lab

Corporate professionals using LCD Lab's Ecosystem Map to explore the planetary impacts of products

2024 was full of adventures for the Life-centred Design Lab, while I personally sought a better balance with my LCD work, full-time UX work, family and friends, and well-being.

Here's how the LCD Lab continued to spread the word on Life-centred Design...

🌍 I had the honour to...

Be invited to Italy by Professor Fabio Di Liberto, from Politecnico di Milano, to support his “Design From a Plant's Perspective” design challenge and mentor students about biomimicry and non-human personas (See the project)
Introduce non-human personas and LCD to the Design for Good Academy at Royal College of Art
Be invited to Portugal by Nova School of Business and Economics to Ecosystem Map the planetary impacts of products and businesses
Guest speak on the wonderful The Sustainable UX podcast

Ecosystem mapping the impacts of products with NOVA School of Business and Economics

👬 I got to collaborate with awesome people

Susie Pratt, Samuel Yu (University Of Technology Sydney), and I produced a research paper about how futuring can include More Than Human needs, and we developed and ran a More Than Human Futures Ministries workshop exploring future ministries with animal board members
As part of The Life-centred Design Collective, we published our paper "Reflections on the Usefulness and Limitations of Tools for Life-Centred Design” (Download the paper)

🤹 The Lab continued to experiment:

Producing “Redesigning The Line”, a documentary to capture the speakers and students of Politecnico and their wonderful More Than Human redesign of their university’s expansion into the neighbouring forest (Watch the documentary)
Cleaning up my own neighbourhood, I collected discarded household waste to make a wall sculpture and transformed it into a design fiction to inspire life-centred thinking (View the artwork)

Teaching non-human personas and biomimicry to students in a forest in Milan

💡 The Lab launched more tools and resources...

Life-centred Design Foundations Course
Life-centred Design Innovation Cards
Life-Centred User Journey Map tool
Life-centred Design In Nature Workshop Toolkit
The Life-centred Designer Newsletter to share 8 LCD Mindsets

🌳🌳 Still planting trees...🌳🌳

And so far the Lab has planted 110 trees to give back, via One Tree Planted

Reflecting and forging ahead...

Looking back, I’m excited... and a little exhausted! I haven’t found the right balance of time and energy for all this yet. But at the same time, I feel the Lab has yet to find its true form, and there are people doing more than me while also raising kids. Amazing!

So, after a break and time with friends, onwards into 2025 the Lab and I will go, recharged and reorganised, and to continue nurturing the growing shift towards life-centred design.