The Life-centred Purpose Tool—Setting global goals for your project
Use the Life-centred Purpose tool to align your product, project, team, or business with global goals and define achievable actions
Using life-centred design thinking, you can expand your design project’s value by aligning it with global goals and brainstorming ways to support and contribute to a sustainable, regenerative, and socially-just future.
Design projects and businesses often aim for the biggest market, but these may not be the best in terms of life-centred design. Life-centred design considers the entire lifecycle of a product, including any physical components supporting digital services, and their impacts on the people, animals, and environment along the supply chain now and in the future.
Experts in the field highlight the importance of defining a life-centred value proposition by focusing on adding value to the system, not the product alone, by aligning the project or business purpose with global goals.
While many projects state a clear purpose and values, defining a life-centred purpose conveys how the project aligns making profits with generating environmental and societal value.
A life-centred purpose is the higher purpose that the product or service is a part of.
By defining and sharing a clear social and environmental purpose, from the business model and circular design of their product to the inclusivity of the workplace, life-centred businesses can transform from being purely profit-driven to becoming mechanisms that align partners, communities, individuals, and ecosystems with global goals.
But you can also start small by exploring how the value-add of your physical or digtial product or service can align with global goals.
What are global goals?
A common set of global goals are the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
These are 17 interconnected global goals (16 goals plus 1 referring to ‘cross sector and cross country collaboration’ to enable the other 16) that form ‘a shared blueprint for peace and prosperity for people and the planet, now and into the future’. Evolved over decades of work by the UN in conjunction with over 170 countries, the SDGs aim to improve life for those most in need of assistance, within and across countries and populations — ‘Furthest behind first’.
- Goal 1. No poverty, in all its forms anywhere
- Goal 2. Zero hunger, food security, improved nutrition, and promotion of sustainable agriculture
- Goal 3. Good health and well-being for all at all ages
- Goal 4. Quality education, inclusive and equitable, to foster lifelong learning opportunities for all
- Goal 5: Gender equality to empower all women and girls
- Goal 6: Clean water and sanitation for all
- Goal 7: Affordable and clean energy accessible to all
- Goal 8: Decent, dignified work for all and sustainable economic growth
- Goal 9: Industry, innovation, and infrastructure
- Goal 10: Reduced inequalities within and among countries
- Goal 11: Sustainable cities and communities that are inclusive, safe, resilient, and sustainable
- Goal 12: Responsible consumption and production patterns that are sustainable
- Goal 13: Climate action to combat climate change and its impacts
- Goal 14: Life below water to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, seas, and marine resources for sustainable development
- Goal 15: Life below land to protect, restore, and promote sustainable use of ecosystems and forests to combat desertification, land degradation, and biodiversity loss
- Goal 16: Peace, justice, and strong institutions to promote peaceful, strong, and inclusive societies for sustainable development and justice for all
- Goal 17: Partnerships for the goals to strengthen implementation and foster global partnership
Businesses are incorporating the SDGs through the Environmental, Social, and Corporate Governance framework (ESG). ESG is a proposed metric released by the World Economic Forum in September 2021 for organisations to set and measure their sustainability improvements, support to societal movements, and governance.
This is important for life-centred design because it connects the work of micro-level product/experience designers, who work for a business with a supported ESG commitment, to the macro-level global goals of the SDGs, focusing all levels of design on creating a sustainable, regenerative, and just world.
While there is not yet one consistent methodology for measurement, traceability and accountability for fulfilling ESG commitments, or a consensus on just how to properly link business-orientated ESGs with global goals, both consumers and investors are becoming more aware of using them as metrics to guide spending and investment.
In Australia, at the time of writing, it is optional for businesses to have ESG commitments. However, in the EU, businesses are now required by law to have them, so it is only a matter of time before every organisation will need to address these.
Two great examples of ESG commitments
· Philips — Along with utilising EcoDesign, Philips partner with suppliers to reduce the environmental impact of the entire lifecycle and to foster fair and dignified working conditions
· Dell — use sustainable materials and other circular strategies; cultivate inclusion in the workplace; embed ethical culture and values in governance; and upskill underrepresented groups
But having a life-centred purpose is not just about ticking boxes.
The Positive Handbook for Regenerative Business refers to businesses that include nature in the process, based on an appreciation that true wealth is environmental and social as well as financial, and are in the ‘right relationship’ with nature.
Example of a life-centred business
A great example of a life-centred business is Patagonia, an American outdoor clothing company with hundreds of stores in over 10 countries across 5 continents, and factories in 16 countries. They’ve aligned their organisation with global goals by utilising their product value, lifecycle connections, and areas of influence to transform from a business just profiting from selling clothes to also championing the many following initiatives:
- Created their manifesto about becoming an antiracist company
- Support fair work conditions for apparel workers
- Utilise Regenerative Organic Certified™ Programs that support people and animals ‘working together to restore the health of our planet’ by improving soil health and reducing greenhouse gas emissions
- Pledged 1% of sales to the preservation and restoration of the natural environment
- Created Worn Wear to encourage the reuse of unwanted clothing and keep the materials in use
- Support environmental action groups
- Use transparency to share supply chain information, so customers know where and how the clothes are made
- Set climate-specific goals
- Share their ethical footprint to remain transparent and accountable
A note on global goals
Not everyone believes in constant growth and development, and these people argue that having development-focused goals (such as the development aspects of ‘Decent work sustainable economic growth’, ‘Peace, justice, and strong institutions, and ‘Life on land’) marginalises people and states that don’t adhere to the dominant Euro-Western values of constant economic growth and development.
Authors of Pluriverse: A post-development dictionary, a collection of 100 essays on alternatives to globalisation, argue the capitalism of the 1980s distorted the sustainability focus of earlier incarnations of the SDGs. Since then, they argue, the SDGs have become ‘a programme of poverty alleviation without delving deep enough into causes of poverty and have become a movement to solve the ‘development problems’ of the Global South by funding them into becoming capitalistic replica states of the Global North.
As an alternative, the authors suggest the following should be the values of sustainable and just societies that pluriversal design can foster:
- Diversity and plurality
- Autonomy and self-reliance
- Solidarity and reciprocity
- Commons and collective ethics
- Oneness with the rights of nature
- Interdependence
- Simplicity and ‘enoughness’
- Inclusiveness and dignity
- Justice and equity
- Non-hierarchy
- Dignity of labour
- Rights and responsibilities
- Ecological sustainability
- Non-violence and peace
They are essentially the same as the SDGs but with a focus on thriving rather than growing.
In the spirit of including all voices and perspectives, the Life-centred purpose tool includes a version with these values as an alternative set of global goals.
My life-centred purpose
I used the tool to establish a greater purpose for my book, The Life Centred Design Guide, beyond just sharing information about life-centred design.
To hold myself accountable, I published my life-centred purpose statement on my website.
The global goals I aligned with were:
- Quality education
- Reduced inequalities
- Climate action
- Life on land
- Responsible consumption and production
The tool produced the following life-centred actions:
- Regenerating trees — Donating 1% of sales of the printed guidebook to onetreeplanted.org
- Reducing waste — Utilising print-on-demand and providing guidance on keeping the book circular
- Reducing energy consumption — improve my digital channels to embrace more sustainable digital practices to reduce energy consumption
- Fostering the pluriverse — Keeping Indigenous People’s sustainable and regenerative practices in the conversation
- Fostering open-source — Providing free tools with license to remix and reshare
- Transparency in actions — Sharing commitments openly
These actions give my one little book a greater purpose and alignment with global goals. They could also be grouped according to the ESG framework.
Environment:
- Regenerating trees
- Reducing energy consumption
- Reducing waste
Social:
- Fostering the pluriverse
- Fostering open-source
Governance:
- Transparency in actions
Explore your life-centred purpose
A life-centred purpose should be succinct in what to do and what not to do, be grounded in possibility, yet inspiring in its potential.
It should guide everything from strategy and operations to culture, with diversity, inclusion, and fair pay as defaults, and utilising regenerative concepts to elevate and thrive individual’s potential.
Finally, a life-centred purpose should be held accountable by establishing measures such as deadlines and timelines to develop credibility and safeguard real progress.
Get the Life-centred Purpose Tool
Use this Life-centred Purpose tool to start exploring how to align the purpose of your product, business, or personal projects with global goals.
More from Damien…
Explore Damien’s two design innovation labs:
- Life-centred Design Lab — expanding human-centred design to include nature and invisible communities
- Future Scouting — Designing life-centred, values-driven future tech products with speculative design
Get practical with tools and courses:
- Life-centred Design Books and Toolkits
- Life-centred Design Courses
- Life-centred Design Innovation Cards
Follow Damien on Medium for more fringe design thinking and experiments.
