Non-human personas help us understand nature or non-nature in a way that goes beyond written papers and numbers of scientific research. If we want to design for a better planet, we need to include the voice of nature. And you do that using non-human personas and incorporating them into our life-centered design practices.

On October 28th, Jeroen Spoelstra and Alejandra Ramón facilitated the first LCD urban workshop as part of the VII International Design and Business Forum. They led twelve people working in three teams on their first approach towards a sustainable transformation.

We are excited to welcome Alejandra Ramon to the Unbeaten Studio team as a strategic designer. We have known each other since the first year we live in the Pyrenees and always have been looking to find ways to collaborate.

I first read about Non-human personas via Monika Sznel, who developed a non-human persona from the Baltic Sea and Damien Lutz, who developed several Life-Centered Design tools. I used their work as inspiration for creating the Unbeaten Studio version when we made our Life-Centered Design in Action workshop. Recently we had the opportunity to create a Non-human persona about a beautiful mountain lake Ibón de Plan.

I my blog “Moving from Human-centered design towards Life-centered design” I talk about why we should change from putting humans at the centre of our creation to putting life on our planet at the core. In this blog, I want to highlight 7 key differences between HCD and LCD

As designers, we have to reinvent the way we live in relationship to the natural and human world around us. We need to design new connections with each other, with our food, our work and most importantly, life on earth around us. This start with the realisation that humans are part of nature.

After these five books, you have a better understanding of Life Centered Design. Chris Do said in one of the courses I followed, "Read & study the 5 key books on the topic you want to be known for." I didn't find 5 books on Life Centered Design. Instead ….

We often get the question, Who are you designing for when talking about Life-Centered Design? I think you can roughly divide this into three categories within LCD.

On September 15th, we organised a Life-Centered Design co-design session at the Kantoor Karavaan in MijnStadstuin in Amsterdam. In this blog you can read about what we learned about Life-Centered Design

Life-Centered Design feels like the start of a new design era, one I'm enormously excited to lead! LCD has been in the making by several designers over the last couple of years.

Since we unexpectedly met in 2016, our lives have been nothing but an adventure. I can't point out what it is, but just doing all of these crazy things with Jeroen feels so right (maybe it's love, jaja)…

Creating our trend report last year and living close to nature made me realise we need to move away from human centered design and make shift towards Life-Centered Design.

Definitely rural life is “living our dream life”. But as the famous motivational quote states “dreams don’t work unless you do”. Making this big step takes extreme amounts of motivation, trust, positivity and an adventurous side.

Are you a design minded professional?

Are you very ambitious & hard working in changing the world for the better, either towards a better planet or towards a more humane & educated society…

Why life centered? Well it is no longer enough to just focus on humans. We need to think about the planet and it’s eco systems we live in.

Design thinking is the changing the way we think about internships.

The night that looked like day

During the 2 months of lockdown our friend and filmmaker Susanne Opstal asked us to film snippets from our lockdown life.

You are so busy working (for others) and doing the day to day things, that you forget to really work on yourself. Doing your own branding is hard, because you are emotionally attached to your own business.

Working in solitude or in a small community creates opportunities that make you rush less, focus more and reflect deeper. In this blog I share some insights on living and working in Usana.

We won’t be going back to what used to be called “normal” life anytime soon. With “we” I mean society in general and us in particular.