Redesign a product and its business model to be more sustainable, inclusive, and regenerative
Course details
Design products to be planet-friendlier ecosystems
Throughout the course, you’ll apply your learnings to a real or hypothetical product-based business of your choice—culminating in a powerful blue-sky innovation summary.
You’ll first optimise the product to be as circular, inclusive, and animal-friendlier as possible and innovate the business model to be more life-centred. You’ll then create a non-human persona to innovate regenerative strategies and design initiatives to support related planetary goals. After using the Futures Wheel to explore unseen consequences and setting data-based metrics, you’ll summarise your life-centred redesign in a summary presentation.
What you will learn
At your own pace, you’ll learn the basics of:
- Ecosystem Mind Mapping
- Product Lifecycle Mapping
- Circular and Inclusive Design
- Designing for Animal Welfare
- Behavioural Design
- Non-human Personas
- Regenerative Design
- Aligning with planetary goals
- Future Thinking
- Data-based 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:
- 45 Modules
- 25 Activities & 15 Instructional Videos
- 16 Tools
- 10 Digital Decks of Innovation Strategy Cards
- Certificate on Submitted Completion
- Lifetime Access
What you’ll need:
- An online whiteboard like Miro or Mural
- Approx. 17 -20 hours to complete the course
Unique Innovation Tools
The Lab’s kit of 16 unique life-centred design tools that merge new and emerging design practices to help you bring more life into your design and decision-making.
Instructional Videos
Step-by-step instructional videos for each tool with full examples of the tools at different stages of use.
Online Strategy Cards
Comprehensive strategies for every step of the process to empower the tools with knowledge about designing for the needs of people, animals and the environment.
Who this course is for
About 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.
Past Student Projects
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
Enrolment Options
Life-centred Industrial Designer
For designers wanting to do less harm and more good now
$1299 Promo Discount
$1199 AUD
Life-centred Industrial Designer Plus
For planet-focused designers wanting feedback, growth, and certification
PRO INCLUDES:
$1499 Promo Discount
$1399 AUD
Life-centred Industrial Team
For planet-focused design teams of 4+ Designers
TEAM INCLUDES:
$4800 Promo Discount
$4600 AUD
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 and digital designers, creative professionals, product and business owners, futurists, and anyone else who wants to learn how to take action and start conversations about positively impacting the planet and society with design.
The course is best for anyone with some basic design or business knowledge, but all our welcome and will be inspired.
The minimum time to complete this course properly is about 5-6 hours. The videos total about 1 hour of viewing, time spent on the 3 key activities is recommended 1 hour each. 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 material for up to 12 months after the purchase date.
The course teaches the key steps through tasks using the tools provided, with instructional videos. You will get to choose your subject and non-human or non-user to work with. Your subject may be a design project you are working on, a website, a product, or a human-made environment like a park or a city.
Yes! The course is completely online at at your own pace from any time zone.
To ensure the integrity of this course, certificates are only given to those who submit their work for review.
Step 1: Send me an email
Send an email to in**@*********ed.design to let me know you want to start the certification process. Include copies of (or links to) the following
-
- One non-human or non-user Persona
- One multi-media Persona
- Your innovation ideas for your course subject
- Any questions you have
Step 2: I will review your materials
Step 3: I’ll send you your certificate!
Please note: To receive your certificate with your correct name on completion of the course, please ensure your name is correct in your account.
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 in**@*********ed.design.
Yes! Life-centred Design Lab & Academy are committed to providing equitable access.
- Student Discounts
- Discounts are also available for designers in financial hardship or from economies incompatible with Australia—Equity Discounts
