Life-centred design for digital designers

Tips for UX and UI designers to design more circular, inclusive, and responsible digital experiences

Published in

UX Collective

12 min readSep 7, 2022

Life-centred design is an emerging practice that expands human-centred design to ensure humanity considers the impacts of its activities on all peoples, all animals, and all planet.

It does this by recognising every product, service, and experience is part of a supply chain that can span countries and cultures, with a lifecycle that starts from when materials are taken from the ground to when products are discarded.

Combining multiple design practices, one of life-centred design’s key practices is circular design, or designing for the circular economy.

The circular economy aims to reduce waste, pollution, and the use of virgin materials by designing ways for products to be constantly repaired, reused, remade, and recycled. This means redesigning business models, too, so products can become part of a service where fewer people own things and more people pay for access to use things only when needed.

A diagram showing the circulation of materials as they are reused, repaired, and remade. — A circular product lifecycle

While much of the sustainability strategies and circular thinking relate to physical product design, the real-world impact of digital products and experiences can be harder to keep in mind.

But Information Communication Technology (computers, phones, and TVs) is now responsible for far more greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation industry.

Every web page visited, image loaded, video streamed, online purchase made, information submitted, and backend system call generated by online activity requires energy to power and process the data flowing between devices, network systems, servers and back again, many times over — all of which emit CO2. And every digital experience drives the use of devices that fuel the mining of the materials required to make these devices.

So digital designers need to be aware of how they can minimise the use of the physical resources that support the digital experience.

But life-centred design is not just about designing better for the environment, it’s also about designing for social justice and equality.

Whether physical or digital, the insatiable demand for products by prosperous countries drives injustice in the countries where the materials are sources. Computers, laptops & mobile phones, for example, rank in the top 5 of The Global Slavery Index’s list of consumer goods areas most at risk of slavery in their supply chain, which contributes to over 40 million people trapped in modern slavery worldwide.

Designing with more social awareness means being better designers as human beings, knowing our own privileges and power, and using them with greater empathy and responsibility.

Life-centred design for digital

To design digital experiences that are better for the environment and all people involved in or impacted by supply chains, think in terms of three design pillars to champion in every design project.

The 3 design pillars of life-centred design, as described in the article. — The 3 design pillars of life-centred design

Inclusive & pluriversal

Human-centred design remains at the core of life-centred design, but what makes it different from today’s practice is that inclusivity is practised by default. Accessibility and diversity considerations are not optional or retrofit, and diverse users are represented at all research, testing, and at key decision-making stages.

Diversity of culture and ways of being are also recognised and nurtured through pluriversal design, so that social justice is upheld for all peoples along the supply chain.

Responsible & aligned

While this pillar is mostly applied to the business model, through strategies such as aligning with life-centred partners, distributing manufacturing, converting product to service, and fostering a life-centred work culture, designers can uphold this pillar by understanding their place in the greater ecosystem of the product lifecycle.

Developing systems thinking and foresight skills to recognise the greater impacts of their micro-level design decisions, learning about privilege to use it to champion those less privileged, and responsibly using behavioural design to encourage and enable sustainable and just behaviour in users.

Sustainable & regenerative

Sustainability is about perpetuating today’s business models in a way that ensures enough resources remain for future generations to get by. But these models contribute massively to today’s wicked problems, and ‘getting by’ is not thriving. Any future sustainable design must also heal the damage that has been done, socially and environmentally, and regenerate what it takes.

Regenerative thinking focuses on giving back much more than is taken, generating positive impacts for the environmental and human systems that design and manufacturing activities support or draw from, so that humans co-evolve harmoniously with nature.

Using sustainable digital practices and systems thinking, digital designers can reduce the energy used in their experiences and seek ways to use the prosperity of their product to give back to communities and resources.

These three pillars directly align with the Environment, Social, and Governance framework now mandated by the EU for all organisations to set, nurture, and monitor life-centred actions.

So aiming to uphold these pillars helps designers embed every project with its own ESG commitments, which connect their work to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The 17 United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Using the pillars as a guide, and drawing on multiple practices—such as sustainable digital design, systems thinking, behavioural design, inclusive design, pluriversal design, and foresight—the strategies below are drawn from existing practices to implement sustainable, regenerative, and socially just thinking in digital design.

Sustainable and regenerative strategies

Audit your digital footprint

Estimate your web page carbon footprint with online tools that also give tips on how to improve:

Optimise content for sustainability

Employ various strategies to reduce the overall emissions of your digital channels:

Design for mobile first to optimise the design for minimum essential content and maintain minimalism across all screen sizes
Optimise content by using images, videos, graphics, and fonts sparingly
Minimise styling to generate less code and processing
Maximise user journey efficiency to reduce the time and energy expended by users
Minimise emails and communications

Advocate for green hosting

Simply altering your choice of hosting can make a significant impact. Advocate for transitioning digital channels to green hosting options that are powered by renewables.

Define a life-centred purpose

Use a tool like the Life-Centred Purpose Tool to address the negative impacts of your product, connect them with global goals, and flip them into opportunities for redesign and regenerative action.

Inclusive and pluriversal strategies

While there’s a lot to understand about designing inclusively, it’s not about retrofitting designs, but designing for all people by default from the beginning.

It means baking accessibility and diversity into the style guide, and including a diversity of users in research, testing, and at key decision-making stages.

It’s also about seeing the complexities of user needs as opportunities for innovation.

Accessible websites and policies, the iPhone’s accessibility settings, and the electric toothbrush are all innovations designed for less common experiences which also brought new benefits to all users. Video captions, for example, not only allow the Deaf and hearing-impaired to experience video, but they have also been extended to all users as new benefits such as for translation or for enjoying videos in noisy settings.

Author and media scholar Böjrn Rohles shares principles for inclusive UX in his excellent article Principles for diversity in UX design:

Respect diversity and understand it as a strength for society and design
Ensure functionality and comprehensibility for all user groups
Consider ethical trade-offs in every design decision
Keep an open mind, and question all design decisions
Ensure flexibility and customisability of the product or service
Design iteratively and test continuously with as many and diverse people as possible
Prioritise security, privacy, accessibility, and good user experience
Consider the design from many angles (systems thinking) and weigh the effects of a design in a context for which it was not intended

Intersectionality

Another diversity aspect coming more into focus is intersectionality — when different aspects of a person’s identity expose them to overlapping discrimination and marginalisation, whether by societal attitudes, systems, or structures.

Intersectionality further expands the understanding of diversity by its inclusion of more socioeconomic factors, like mental health, and criminal and medical records.

Racial and gender biases are already well-documented in the perpetuation of ‘sexist hiring practices, racist criminal justice procedures, predatory advertising, and the spread of false information’. And just as racial bias is well documented in AI, the systemic wealth, health, opportunity, and power inequalities for the LGBTQ+ community can be perpetuated without innovation de-centred from data sourced from only heterosexual and cisgender-focused needs.

As an example, below are two experiences to consider the intersectional experience of a white, cis, non-disabled woman who identifies as a lesbian:

Experience 1—Designing for gender equality

A synthesis of various principles lists advocating for gender equality:

Only collect gender-specific data if it’s necessary
Use gender-neutral language
Be upfront about intent when collecting data
Avoid suggesting or perpetuating hierarchy by listing info/fields in alphabetical order
Give options recognising diversity when collecting data

Experience 2—Designing for the LGBTQ+ community

Jason Tester, a research affiliate at the Institute for the Future and board member of the US National LGBTQ+ Task Force, initiated queerthefuture.org to foster futures of resilience and freedom from ongoing hostility. From his 17 years of experience in research and co-creative activities, Tester provides the following insights for including LGBTQ+ values:

Go beyond democratising access to innovation by identifying and dismantling inherent biases and discriminations in research and development
Find comfort outside categorisation
Understanding how different aspects of a person’s identity can expose them to coincidental discrimination and marginalisation to foster the full richness of diversity
Prioritise the pleasure and joy that the community have always celebrated long before they were recognised and valued for their ‘differences
Leverage the community’s adaptability and resourcefulness born from their oppression

Nurture the pluriverse

As mentioned earlier, the lifecycles of many products also impact non-users — workers in mines, farms, and factories in the different countries of a supply chain, and the communities nearby that may have very different values.

To protect the pluriverse of diversity connected to a product’s lifecycle, inclusive life-centred product design needs to have an awareness and respect for ways of being that differ from the Euro-Western-centric focus on constant development and financial growth.

This is where pluriversal design can inform inclusivity as it is shaped for life-centred design.

Pluriversal design deconstructs the design process by decentring the designer so that they act as a facilitator who lends their skills and self to enable the users to design the solution for themselves and with their own values, knowledge, resources, and cultural assets. In this way, pluriversal design also decolonises modern design and helps to mitigate social injustices perpetuated through global capitalism.

While pluriversal design is practised more at the community and global level, it becomes more relevant to product and service design when we consider the full product lifecycle and the various cultures, social systems, locations, and ecosystems that the lifecycle impacts.

Also, digital and product designers are often creating experiences for mass use by multiple cultures, so any small exclusion or marginalisation can be greatly amplified and perpetuated. For example, how might people living in areas that rely on following moon cycles for harvesting still use an app that sets dates, etc, based on the Gregorian calendar which recognises only Western rituals?

This risk of marginalisation is being further amplified by emerging technologies, such as the virtual and augmented realities of the metaverse, an innovation already enabling monopolisation and privatisation of digital space and experience.

In their PIVOT 2021 presentation ‘Rolling Stones: Dismantling, reassembling, and reimagining possible tools through collaborative story-making approaches’, Manuela Taboada & Dr Jane Turner addressed the challenge of staying in the pluriverse mindset when working within existing modern capitalist design systems. They recommend facilitating imagination rather than just finding solutions, and for the process itself to be a sharing of worldviews as a means of dismantling standard design thinking and process.

Nurture the digital pluriverse of users and non-users:

Designing for pluri-clusivity as the default experience, using the complexity of diversity as inspiration for innovation.
Using participatory design to decentre the designer and allowing users to design their solution according to their values
Design in ways to allow users of different cultures, beliefs, and ways of being to be able to customise and localise their digital experience
Use a variety of workshop tools, from dice and cards and gamification to sticks and string, and stimulate dialogue and interaction over answers
Have an awareness of the non-users who support the physical aspects of the digital experience—the network tower engineers, the IT support teams, the factory workers in different countries making smart devices, and the miners extracting the metals from the ground. Create non-user personas of users from the different worlds along the supply chain

Responsible and aligned strategies

Foster user stewardship and behaviour

Be transparent with information to inform and empower users and build their understanding of life-centredness
Use behavioural design to identify unsustainable or unethical behaviour such as overuse, addiction, and trolling, and inform, enable, and encourage users about how the product can be used in ways that are fairer and consume fewer resources (energy, data, network usage, etc.)
Be aware of dark patterns to avoid embedding them in your designs
Embed feedback mechanisms and utilise social platforms to learn continuously, break down silos, connect communities, and drive user/designer/business collaboration

Take a life-cycle view

Take a regular systems view of your product’s lifecycle to understand the relationships between the business, its resources, and its partners, who they are, where they are, and what their values are. Work with service designers and experiment with the Phygital Map to acknowledge and remain mindful of the physical resources supporting the digital experience. Having a systems-level awareness can help UX and visual designers foster user awareness of these resources and communities and ways to renourish them.

The Phygital Map, a tool to map the invisible physical resources supporting a digital experience.

Apply a time lens

Use foresight methods to protect future stakeholders by testing design changes and future scenarios.

Use the Futures Wheel to brainstorm the impacts of a design decision
Create fictional news headlines to envision future impacts of a decision or direction, to engage stakeholders
Create Future versions of your Personas to explore changing needs and problems

See this article for foresight templates and instructions.

The Futures Wheel, a tool for brainstorming consequences.

Know your privileges and power

Use a guide like Maya Goodwill’s ‘A Social Designer’s Field Guide to Power Literacy’ to know your personal privileges and be aware of how they contribute to social injustice, exclusion, and lack of diversity — and to use your privilege as a power to fight for a fairer experience for all users and all workers and communities impacted by the supply chain.

Design is in great flux

With uncertainty and change increasing in the world, the way we think and design is being forced to adapt.

That means the role of the designer is changing.

We can no longer be solely focused on the immediate experiences we design,—we need to be able to zoom out and see how what we do fits into greater ecosystems.

While there is a lot of work happening at the global, social, and business levels, the practicalities of applying life-centred thinking at the product level are still filtering into practice.

I really believe there are amazing ideas and solutions in the minds of all designers, of all experience levels, that can contribute to the evolution and implementation of life-centred design.

I hope this article has inspired some ideas on how you can start experimenting and contributing to the digital space. Choose one aspect that excites you to learn more and experiment with ways to incorporate it into your work, and share back your findings to keep the conversation going.