How can we teach the essential competencies for designing with respect for all living beings?
LIFE-CENTERED DESIGN
Making life-centered design more accessible and engaging, through a series of backpack missions
Client
UW-Madison in collaboration with Massive Change Network
Date
September 2024 - December 2024
Industry
Higher Education
Scope of work
Experience Design
HERE’S WHAT WE FOUND
1
A meaningful learning experience broadens perspectives, sparks engagement, and fosters a supportive environment.
Courses outside one’s field and passionate, relatable teaching make lessons more impactful.
Inspiration drives transformative learning, and education should embrace a life-centered approach, treating classrooms as ecosystems.
These insights directly informed the five essential competencies we identified for teaching life-centered design. Each skill reflects a key theme that emerged from student interviews, helping bridge research with practice.
Observation
Encourages curiosity and seeing beyond the obvious
Mindfullness
Supports presence and self-awareness in complex systems
Holistic Thinking
Broadens perspective beyond human-centered frameworks
Empathy & Connection
Builds understanding and relationships across differences
Visualization
Translates abstract ideas into clear, shareable insights
Suggested items: Camera, magnifying glass
Steps:
Patterns in nature emerge through careful observation of your surroundings and the time spent immersing yourself in a space. For new designers, observation is an essential skill and a rich source of inspiration.
Life-centered designers, in particular, can harness observation as a powerful tool to gain a deeper understanding of the world—revealing the intricate interactions between natural and human elements that often go unnoticed.
Description:
Patterns in Nature - OBSERVATION
1. Select a space that includes a mix of natural and human-made elements.
2. Spend time observing the area to find repeating patterns in nature (leaf veins, insect wings, wood grain/bark), then find repeating patterns in human made structures (brick, tile, footprints).
3. Find similarities between human and nature made patterns and sketch or take a picture of at least 2 patterns that you find.
4. Reflect in your journal about your findings and how we can take inspiration from nature in our design using observation.
Description:
Steps:
Sketching is a powerful learning tool that encourages students to reflect deeply on their subject. For designers, it serves as an observational practice, sharpening attention to the physical world around them.
Try sketching a scene that captures the relationship between humans and nature—notice the connections, interactions, and details that emerge!
Suggested items: Pen, paper, camera
Find an outdoor location where nature and human design overlap, like a park or garden.
Spend time observing the environment, paying attention to how people interact with nature or how man-made elements interact with the natural world.
Sketch the scene to highlight the relationships between humans and nature.
Reflect in your journal about your findings and their meaning.
Outdoor Sketching - OBSERVATION
Select an object from your surroundings (eg, fruit, plant, mug).
Observe the object closely, paying attention to its form and details.
Sketch the object in your notebook, breaking it down into basic shapes and sculpt the object from clay.
Compare the sculpture with the real object and reflect in your notebook about how accurately you captured its form and details. What was challenging?
Many designers are familiar with pen and paper as a medium, but have you tried working with clay? Exploring a different medium can offer a new way to reflect on your surroundings.
Clay encourages a focus on texture and details that might be overlooked in a drawing or photograph.
It doesn’t have to be perfect—just do your best to capture exactly what you see!
Suggested items: Clay, magnifying glass
Description:
Steps:
Sculpting Activity - OBSERVATION
Projects
Home
INTRODUCTION
THE CHALLENGE
Life-centered design goes beyond human-centered design by considering the needs of all living things and the planet. While most designers are taught to prioritize human needs, they often overlook the broader goal: designing for all life. Our challenge was to create accessible experiences for students new to design thinking—ones that would instill a mindset of empathy, sustainability, and systems thinking from the start.
Exploration
UNDERSTANDING LIFE-CENTERED DESIGN
Since my primary focus has always been human-centered design, I had to spend time understanding life-centered design concepts myself before I could create something meaningful for others.
I learned life-centered design through readings, reflection, visual diagramming, and hands-on exploration. Studying MC24 and other sources challenged my perspective and helped me internalize key ideas.
Once I could apply life-centered design concepts to my own life and scenarios, I felt confident in teaching its core competencies to others.
REsearch
INTERVIEWING STUDENTS
To design backpack missions that would leave a lasting impact on new designers and encourage them to integrate life-centered design into their practice, we first had to answer a crucial question:
What makes a learning experience truly memorable and impactful?
Our team walked around campus and interviewed students on this very question.
DEFINE
IDENTIFYING 5 ESSENTIAL SKILLS
We selected 5 essential core competencies for new designers learning life-centered design. Together, these skills lay the foundation for life-centered design and reflect the qualities that make learning truly impactful.
PROTOTYPE
DEVELOPING BACKPACK MISSIONS
Once we had our core competencies, we started to plan out our backpack missions. Each team member focused on creating missions for a specific competency, and I selected Observation.
Here are some of the observation-based missions that I created:
EMPATHIZE
SKETCHED STORYBOARD
Once we finalized the backpack missions and items, we used storyboarding to visualize how we would introduce the course to new students. This helped us craft a brief explanation of life-centered design and the backpack missions.
REFLECTION
TEACHING TESTS UNDERSTANDING
The goal of this project was to create meaningful learning experiences—but in doing so, I experienced one myself.
Studying life-centered design and weaving it into the backpack missions made me realize it’s a mindset I want to carry into my own practice. I’ve learned that real learning happens when you dive in—stepping out of your comfort zone, exploring new ideas, and applying them right away.
The backpack missions are designed to do just that: challenge new designers to shift their perspective, think holistically, and embrace the unfamiliar. By fostering this mindset, we can inspire a more thoughtful, engaged, and innovative generation of designers.
INTRODUCTION
MAIN OBJECTIVE
With that goal in mind, we created a series of “backpack missions," hands-on activities using physical objects to introduce life-centered design. The idea was simple: everything you need fits in one backpack, making the experience portable, interactive, and approachable.
PROTOTYPE
MISSION ITEMS
After mapping out our missions, it was time to prototype our mission items. Instead of buying the actual items, we decided to draw them digitally in Adobe Illustrator, print, laminate, and cut them out.
EMPATHIZE
VIDEO STORYBOARD
Once we had a drawn version of the storyboard, we filmed a backpack “unboxing” video to further explain how to use the missions and their benefits.