Totems
Exploring the idea of businesses giving back to the non-humans they use or impact through totemism
About
Should industries create non-human personas for their collective resources, and be guided by the traditional wisdom of totemism, to deepen the relationships between humans and the world?
Totems ↗ represent non-human entities like natural objects, plants, animals, spirit beings, or the weather.
The word totem is actually an anglicisation ↗ of the Ojibwe ↗ word for clan (doodem).
How might we evolve the use of non-human personas in the design and business world by learning from the traditional and ecological wisdom of totemism and commons?
This page further explores the concept introduced in this Medium article ↗ by creating a web page for lifecentred.design’s membership to a totem collective.
Links
- Non-human and non-user personas for life-centred design ↗—An introduction
- Non-human personas and totems ↗—Drawing from indigenous totemism to deepen the use of non-human personas
Our Totem Collective
Our non-human totem
Our printed books use paper which draw from Trees and Forests.
Our totem commitments
- Reduce impact by using print-on-demand instead of pre-printing mass amounts
- Regenerate by donating to onetreeplanted.org who plant trees on our behalf
- Inform users of our books about how to make their book last longer and how to keep their books circular when they are finished with them
Collective members
Subscribe to download
Get the guide book
