Designing Life-centred Futures
Futuring with a More-Than-Human lens to shape sustainable, inclusive, and regenerative systems, products, and places
Exploring and nurturing future possibilities
Designing sustainable futures is about actively shaping what should happen, with care for people, non-human life, and the living systems that make all futures possible.
Incorporating aspects from traditional long-term thinking—such as Seven Generations thinking and Stewardship over ownership—the Life-centred Design Lab’s approach to designing sustainable futures asks us to design and act today in ways that honour past generations, sustain present life, and protect the wellbeing of those yet to come.
Identify possible and alternate futures
Discover the many unseen futures to broaden our idea of what’s possible, including alternative, regenerative, and more-than-human futures
Mitigate Future Harm
Anticipating unintended consequences before they become locked in
Design preferred futures
Articulating the futures we want so we can act today to manifest them
Innovate For Future Needs
Designing new products, services, or business models under uncertainty
Impacts of designing only for the short-term
Many futures are designed through short-term thinking, narrow worldviews, and a belief that problems can always be fixed later.
This leads to innovation that looks successful in the present but creates harm downstream for people, non-human life, and the planet. When sustainability is reduced to optimisation instead of transformation, planetary limits are recognised too late, after systems have already locked in damage.
- Hidden social costs emerge over time, including inequality, exclusion, and loss of trust
- Products and systems optimise for engagement or efficiency at the expense of wellbeing
- Communities inherit the consequences of decisions they had little voice in shaping
- Future generations are burdened with problems they did not create, from digital debt to environmental damage
- Non-human life is treated as invisible or expendable within design decisions
- Infrastructure, products, and supply chains fragment habitats and disrupt ecosystems
- Harm to animals is often indirect, delayed, and therefore easy to ignore
- Once impacts become visible, systems are already too entrenched to change easily
- Natural systems are used as buffers for human activity rather than living systems with limits
- Extraction, pollution, and waste are externalised rather than designed out
- Landscapes are degraded faster than they can recover
- Design decisions lock in environmental harm for decades
There are many Futures to design for!
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