Life-centred Design
What if we designed every product, website, urban space, and system as if it were a living, breathing, healthy ecosystem?
What if we included the needs of all the lifeforms our designs and their ecosystems touched—every community, animal, and environment?
This is the premise of Life-centred Design.
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.
Crafting the Framework
In 2020, no longer able to ignore the impact of every design decision on ecosystems and communities, I wanted to do something about it.
Over 18 months, I immersed myself in biomimicry, circular design, systems thinking, futures, and regenerative practices, analysing the work of 30+ designers working at the edges of environmental and social design. The result was the Life-centred Design framework and guidebook: the first complete framework of its kind.
The framework resonated, and as it expanded across industrial, digital, and urban design, invitations followed—to teach, workshop, and speak across Australia and Europe, in classrooms, forests, and out in the cities themselves.
Giving nature a voice
From that same body of work grew another framework entirely.
Designers kept asking how to practically give voice to the plants, animals, and communities impacted by design decisions. That question became the Non-human Persona framework and its guidebook — a practical method for bringing nature and marginalised communities into the design process as legitimate stakeholders.
Teaching in Europe & Australia
The LCD Lab & Academy
To further share LCD with the design community, I founded the LCD Lab & Academy — a growing hub of courses, tools, and resources for designers, innovators, and organisations ready to design beyond the human.
More to explore
My unique and in-depth learning for digital, industrial, and urban designers ready to expand their practice.
Guidebooks, card decks, canvases, and toolkits to put Life-centred Design directly into practice.
Experimental LCD projects across digital, industrial, urban, and business design.
Writing on Life-centred Design, non-human personas, and designing beyond the human.