Hi, I’m Damien!
Life-centred Design Trailblazer, Author, Speaker, Trainer, and Founder of Life-centred Design Lab and Future Scouting
A Sydney-based Multi-disciplinary Designer, I develop new design tools and teach life-centred design to students, designers, and professionals so their designs and businesses do less planetary harm and more good.
Explore my design initiatives
I’m a multi-disciplinary designer
Having completed a Masters of Design Science (Digital Media) in 2008 at Sydney University, I’ve since expanded my skills to become multi-disciplinary and future-explorative, with a focus on learning and employing values-driven practices.
Life-centred Design
Systems Thinking
Sustainable UX
Circular Design
Biomimicry Design
Designing Futures
Teaching and Speaking
From Australia
IN-PERSON & ONLINE—I’ve designed and facilitated life-centred design and futuring workshops for design students, design teams, and corporate and climate professionals, and designed and facilitated my Life-centred Design online courses.
AUSTRALIA-WIDE ONLINE—I’ve taught UX Design & Research Fundamentals for Harness Projects, mentoring up to 12 new students over 3 months about research and problem framing to wire-framing, design, testing, and presenting.
From Europe
LISBON, PORTUGAL—I was invited by NOVA School of Business and Economics to introduce Life-centred Design, Ecosystem Mapping, and Non-human Personas to students and corporate professionals.
MILAN, ITALY—I was honoured to be invited by Politecnico University in Milan to co-facilitate a 5-day workshop with design students using non-human personas and biomimicry tools from my Life-centred Design Lab.
Explore my creative projects
I love experimenting with fringe design practices, mixing mediums, and embracing a ‘frugal engineering’ mindset to push my own technical limitations and the uses of design and art.
My books
I started writing science fiction in 2014, then published Future Scouting to share the method I used to design my future scenarios and technologies. This then led me to develop my life-centred design framework which combines multi-disciplinary practices to design for planetary good.
Commissioned Writing
Life-centred Climate Adaptation
Commissioned by AdaptNSW, I produced an article for the Purpose Conference 2023 about a life-centred approach to climate adaptation to turn risks into for-purpose opportunities.
Short stories about the future of food
Commissioned by the Transformative Times research platform, I translated their key findings about the future of food into short sci-fi stories.
Industry Recognition
My life-centred design and futures work was featured in Ideia Magazine, Portugal
Design For Good recognised The Life-centred Design Guide—“This book stands as a remarkable resource in our field”
My Future Scouting Game received a Notable Design Education Initiative Award in the Core 77 Design Awards 2021.
My cover design for my sci-fi novel The Lenz was the December 2019 winner of the e-Book Cover Design Award
I acknowledge the Gadigal people as the traditional custodians of Sydney and thank them for their knowledge.
I support equality that unites the community.
I support sustainable product design by regenerating the materials of my books.
All my sites are Green Hosted.
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