LIVE ONLINE COURSE
Life-centred Design Foundations
Expand your human-centred design to be more sustainable, regenerative, and inclusive with life-centred design
Course details
AUD $1250
No added taxes
Pay in full or in 4 interest-free payments
Register for next cohort
About the course
What is life-centred design?
Life-centred design (LCD) is an emerging design approach that expands human-centred design to include consideration of sustainable, environmental, and social implications.
By merging design practices and disciplines, LCD connects micro-level design (UX, product engineering, etc.) to nature and related planetary goals by expanding the usual stakeholders of ‘user and business’ to ‘user, local and global communities, animals, ecosystems, and planetary boundaries’.
LCD’s holistic scope and innovative new tools—such as ecosystem mapping and non-human personas—support existing models such as the Doughnut Economy, ESG frameworks, and the UN Sustainability Goals.
What you will learn
At your own pace, you’ll learn the basics of:
- Ecosystem Mapping
- Circular & Inclusive Design
- Non-human Personas
- Regenerative Design
- Design for Sustainable Development Goals
- Futures Thinking & Metric Setting
- LCD influence
By finishing the course, you’ll be able to:
- Represent the needs of all life in decision-making
- Innovate physical products to be more circular, inclusive, and kinder to animals
- Innovate business models and strategies to be more regenerative
- Connect design and business with nature, community, and planetary goals
- Innovate planet-friendlier behaviour strategies
- Set data-based metrics
- Help mitigate climate change and social injustice
What's included
What’s included:
- Weekly Feedback from the group and teacher
- 7 Learning Modules
- 9 Activities & Unique Tools
- Inspiring Resources
- Certificate on Submitted Completion
- Life access to Toolkit
What you’ll need:
- A free account for Miro
- A Gmail account
- 2.5 hours / week for classes
- 1-3 hours / week for homework
About the course project
Through instructional video lessons watched at your own pace, you will create a non-human persona to use to innovate a subject of your choice—whether it’s a design project, a website, a product, or even a human-made space like a park or city.
Grow-your-own Prams
Manuela Risch, Product Discovery and Innovation Consultant
- A pram that a parent ‘grows’ using fungi mycelium, as the baby grows in the mother
- With a compostable frame made of mycelium and organic hemp fabric
- Grow Your Nest provide repairs and collection at end of use for resale, recycling, and composting
Rethinking in-flight waste
Rebecca Dawson, Sustainability and Adaptation Worker
- Re-useable, recyclable, and compostable in-flight meal packaging
- Passenger awareness campaigns and rewards for bringing their own bottle
- In-airport awareness campaigns and composting facility
- Airline partnering with agroforestry initiatives
Plant-based humming-bird feeders
Luis Williams Fallas
- A DWO Assembled (Do With Others) humming-bird feeder to help alleviate elderly solitude and loneliness
- Made with native plants to ensure proper and healthy feed for hummingbirds
- Harm-free monitoring technology to track the health of plants and hummingbirds, shifting the human use of feeders to treat hummingbirds like pets to a relationship about caretaking without interfering
Carbon-storing luggage
Andrés Eduardo Hurtado, UX Designer
- Luggage made from stored carbon using pyrolysis
- Reusing excess gases from the processing stage to power the process itself
- Refurbishing discarded luggage into reusable spare parts
Who the course is for
Course Outline
| Module | Description |
|---|---|
| Week 1—Map your ecosystem | A warm welcome and introduction to the course.
An introduction to systems thinking through mind-mapping your project’s ecosystem of interdependencies and impacts. |
| Week 2—Do Less Harm | An introduction to Circular Design, Designing for Animal Welfare, Inclusive Design, Behavioural Design, and Product Lifecycle Mapping.
Activities to guide you through optimising your product and business model to be as circular, sustainable, inclusive, and kind to animals as possible. |
| Week 3—Give Nature A Voice | An introduction to creating non-human and non-user personas to give voice to the underrepresented lifeforms impacted by your project. |
| Week 4—Do More Good | An introduction to using non-human personas and regenerative Design to innovate your project to shift from taking to caretaking for the lifeforms it impacts. |
| Week 5—Give the future a voice | An introduction to Futures Thinking and setting data-based metrics to respect the needs of future life. |
| Week 6—Align with the world | An introduction to Sustainable Development Goals and Pluriversal Values and how to use them to innovate your project to support them. |
| Week 7—Forge Ahead | Creating a summary presentation of your project and learning ways to forge ahead in the world with your new learnings to gain buy-in and create a positive impact. |
Hear from past students
“My goal was new tools for service portfolio – I got that but feel I learned so much more… A lot of inspiration for changing my business”
—Manuela Risch, Product Discovery and Innovation Consultant
“I enjoyed the activities and deep dive into product design and material life cycles, considering the impacts on the natural world”
—Rebecca Dawson, Sustainability and Adaptation Worker
“Nice company with the course participants! Nice atmosphere”
—Laura Tahvanainen, RDI specialist and Service Designer
Meet your teacher, Damien Lutz
Founder of the Life-centred Design Lab
Author of The Life-Centred Design Guide, The Non-human Persona Guide, and Future Scouting
After over a decade in UX/UI Design & Research, Damien began scouting the fringes of design to develop ways to fully realise design as a superpower for good. He has taught life-centred design in Portugal, Italy, and Australia, and has produced three design guides, along with two online hubs, various toolkits, courses, and workshops to empower designers and decision-makers to be more sustainable, regenerative, inclusive, and future-skilled.
Join Damien to learn new ways to design a thriving existence for all life.
FAQs
This course is for industrial designers and any creative professionals who want to design more holistic, circular, inclusive, and sustainable products, brainstorm regenerative business models, and drive conversations and actions positively impacting the planet and society with design.
The course is best for anyone with some basic design knowledge, whether industrial or otherwise.
The weekly classes are 2.5-3 hours, over 7 weeks, with 1-3 hrs of homework each week. How much time you put in is up to you, but the more you put in the more you will get out of it.
You can access the course toolkit for life.
Each week, you will learn a new life-centred design tool and way of thinking, that you’ll apply to a subject of your choice.
Each lesson includes homework, which everyone presents back at each following class for group feedback and discussion.
By the end of the course, you will have redesigned your subject and have prepared a presentation which you’ll present at the final lesson to also receive feedback.
Yes! The course is completely online at at your own pace from any time zone.
Yes! You will be automatically sent a certificate to the email in your account after you have completed all course lessons and have shared your completed persona in the community.
The course instructor is the Sydney-based designer, researcher, and writer, Damien Lutz, founder of lifecentred.design and futurescouting.com.au, and author The Life-centred Design Guide, The Non-human Persona Guide, and Future Scouting.
Damien created the first framework for life-centred design and published the first guide on life-centred and non-human persona design based on project work, interviews with other practitioners and experts, and research.
Yes, we also offer customised training for creating and using non-human personas as in-house training. Contact us for more details at info@lifecentred.design.
Yes! Lifecentred.design is committed to providing equitable access for designers around the world by offering scholarships at our own discretion.
