What is Life-centred Design?
Designing for all life
Life-centred design (LCD) is an emerging design approach expanding human-centred and profit/growth-focused design to support a balanced existence for all life on the planet by including the needs of all peoples, animals, and environments.
It brings the natural world and vulnerable communities into design and business decisions, helping us create solutions that support rather than harm planetary health.
For ease of consideration during research, design, and decision-making, this framework categorises all life into 3 interdependent Life Groups.
Connecting design and business to planet
LCD is a powerful bridge between individual action and systemic change, allowing designers at every level—from product creators to business leaders—to contribute meaningfully within their sphere of influence to address the problems caused by modern design.
By connecting everyday design choices with global goals like the Doughnut Economy, Planetary Boundaries, UN SDGs, and ESG commitments, LCD turns creativity into a force for addressing global issues and designing a world where all life can thrive.
Key elements of life-centred design
Ecosystem Thinking
A life-centred approach reconfigures today’s scope of the business value map to think of it more as an ecosystem.
It recognises that everything we create is releasing an ecosystem into the world, understands the lifeforms it impacts, and designs it to be a healthier part of the greater planetary ecosystem.
More Than Human
The impacted lifeforms that ecosystem mapping identifies include plants, animals, and environments, expanding design considerations of needs to include the needs of all life, and using non human personas.
Time Honouring
The rise of life-centred design is not a reinvention—it is a remembering. Indigenous and First Nations peoples have practised sustainability and systems thinking for generations.
LCD reconnects modern design with traditional nature-based wisdom, heals past damage, and also looks ahead to envision and shape inclusive and sustainable futures.
A multi-disciplinary approach
Mapping a project’s ecosystem, respecting the needs of all life, and honouring time requires switching and mixing design practices.
Some are very familiar—like Human-centred Design, Accessibility, etc.—while others are new or more fringe branches of design, like Biomimicry, Interspecies Design, and Pluriversal Design.
Apply life-centred design to your work
Digital Design
Digital experiences don’t exist in the cloud—they run on devices, data centres, and global supply chains, with real impacts on people, communities, and the environment.
Life-centred digital design looks at the full lifecycle of content, data, and interactions, asking how each choice can reduce harm, support equity, and create regenerative systems that benefit all life.
Industrial Design
Physical products don’t exist in isolation—they begin with resources and end with waste, affecting people and the planet along the way.
Life-centred industrial design looks at the full cycle of making, using, and returning products, asking how each stage can be reimagined to create regenerative systems that benefit all life.
Urban Design
Cities and human spaces are living systems too. Life-centred urban design explores how we can shape our built environments to work with nature, not against it—supporting biodiversity, community wellbeing, and long-term resilience. It’s about designing places where people and the planet can thrive together.
