Moving from Human-centered design towards Life-centered design
When I watched Tim Brown 2009 TED talk where he shares his ideas about Human-centered design, I got excited about discovering a new design approach. I felt that this was my new path. I worked as a product designer for a number of years with the constant feeling that I was only designing more waste. Human-Centered Design gave me a more social and sustainable perspective of the world. It made my design journey more meaningful. Twelve years later human-centered design/ design thinking has NOT brought what I envisioned. With design thinking, we created even more garbage, both physical and digital. Design thinking and all its branches got highjacked by the business world with the sole goal to sell more stuff/ screen time to more people disguised as experiences and services (I also played my part in this). Creating our trend report last year and living close to nature made me realise we need to move away from human-centered design and make a shift towards Life-Centered Design.
Todays environmental, racial and human challenges are so complex. Our ecosystems are so out of balance, we cannot simply solve this with scientific thinking or with creative thinking. We need to combine both into a Life-centered approach.
Design is traditionally focused on people. You design something for a human to use. Either a product, a service, a business or an organisational change. We have come to learn that this has had a devastating effect on our environment hence the planet. We cannot just design for humans anymore; we need to start looking at the side effects of our actions. We, humans, are part of a bigger picture, an ecosystem and our actions are affecting other people, animals, nature that live in that ecosystem. We call this ecosystem Life and we need to start designing in such a way that it doesn’t harm Life but improves it. We need regenerative solutions for the complete ecosystem not just for us humans. In any case, we need to be aware of the side effects of our solutions for Ecosystem Life.
This is not easy but design as a profession and designers, in particular, have the skills to contribute to a design approach that has Life at the centre.
The current social and environmental challenges we face today are of such a scale that we need an abductive, systemic & scientific approach to uncover previously unknown problems and design solutions based on known & unknown data.
QUOTE which also applies to Life-Centered Design- “We may not know what that answer is, but we know that we have to give ourselves permission to explore.
Human-Centered Designers always start not only from the place of not knowing the answer to the problem they’re looking to solve, they even don’t know the problem they are finding solutions for. And though that’s not particularly comfortable, it allows us to open up creatively, pursue lots of different ideas, and arrive at unexpected solutions. By embracing that ambiguity, and by trusting that the human-centered design process will guide us toward an innovative answer, we actually give ourselves permission to be fantastically creative, curious about finding solutions for problems we don’t know at this moment.
It’s not easy not knowing the answer, and even less so not even knowing the right questions to ask. But if we knew the answer when we started, what could we possibly learn? How could we come up with creative solutions? Where would the people we’re designing for guide us? Embracing ambiguity actually frees us to pursue an answer that we can’t initially imagine, which puts us squarely on the path to routine innovation and lasting impact. –“ Patrice Martin Creative Director and Co-Lead, IDEO.org.
We should take from Human-Centered Design what is good for our planet and throw away what is not beneficial for it. To what is left we add skills and knowledge that helps our biological ecosystems regenerate. And thus create the Life-Centered Design approach.
We will be developing the Life Centered Design approach in the months to come and we will keep you up to date via social media and blogs. LCD is needed now for a thriving future of our planet.
Other articles that might interest you.
Blog: What is Life Centered Design?
Blog: Which 5 books to read about Life Centered Design?
Author: Jeroen Spoelstra
Visuals: Jeroen Spoelstra
