Recap: DesignMeets...Life-Centered Design in the Urban Setting

In the current climate crisis, there’s a shift taking place in design practice that reflects a concern about the future, a desire to do better and an intellectual curiosity about ways of making an impact. A shift that raises questions like, “how can we lessen our impact on nature”? “How might we include nature in our decision-making”? And, “what are the needs of our natural systems”?

LCD looks at the big picture: the perspectives of all stakeholders as we question our reliance on human-centred design and the wisdom of putting people over the needs of all of our natural systems. LCD principles establish inclusivity, longevity, and symbiosis with nature as the building blocks of design and securing a sustainable future.

The Panel

Today’s presentation, “Life-Centered Design for Urban Environments,” looks at these questions with our panel of experts from the fields of sustainability, LCD and Indigenous practices. They include Luigi Ferrara, Sheila Boudreau, Terence Radford and Jeroen Spoelstra.

Luigi Ferrara 

Chair & CEO of the Brookfield Sustainability Institute and Dean, CADIT at George Brown College

Luigi is a registered architect with seal, a member of the Ontario Association of Architects and the Royal Architectural Institute of Canada, as well as an honorary member of the Association of Chartered Industrial Designers.

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The Brookfield Sustainability Institute is a global solutions studio focused on identifying, understanding and developing smart sustainable solutions to help fight climate change. It concentrates on applied solutions and has a global solution studio involving students from around the world developing new ideas and creating new platforms, solving problems by bringing people together to work on them.

“I think we’re at a place where life-centric design is becoming so critical,” he says, “because life as we know it is now in incredible flux.” When he graduated back in 1985, the world was “the horror of the actual versus the nightmare of the imagined.” Knowing that there was a need for sustainable architecture and buildings but, at that time, it meant being very restrictive, leaving an empirical methodology taking us to the horror of the actual. A drive down a main street in small town Canada revealed what the actual meant because it was what was being built all around us.

At the same time, this reality was being merged with what was being called the “cyber-verse,” now known as the metaverse, a separate reality beyond the physical domain, a cyber world that was also the place of nightmares. Imagine the world of video games and cyber worlds, where the true nightmare fantasy is basically a digital sector. Ferrara sees these two trends and recognizes the exciting area is not their divergence but trying to understand their eventual synergy, transforming the real world to the digital world. Seeing them not as separate universes but considering how they can meld together to create a more holistic experience.

“We can’t retreat into the whole physical world, and we shouldn’t jump into a new digital world, leaving the physical world behind,” he says. The challenge is to synthesize the two directions. While the concept is still in the early stages, it’s drawn from a work called Permutation City, written by Australian author Greg Egan in 1994. In it, society is oriented towards the creation of “autoverses” that generate digital life forms able to live for thousands of years.

The calculation is really a metaphor for a reality that happens to be timely now because we are at the point where new forms of life are on the brink of emerging. In this scheme, we must think of all traditional life forms, and also how life itself is going to evolve. For life-centred design, it probably involves landscapes, people and animals, aquatic life, plant life and microscopic life, and the challenge of understanding it and designing for it.

When you have grasped the limits of our physical universe, the next step is to build new universes, which is partly the idea behind Egan’s Permutation City. This is the principle behind Ferrara’s Systemateks generative design – furniture that it is constantly rearranged and reinterpreted. By design, it is constantly interpretable with a continuous evolution, a foretaste of what a life-centred design might look like.

Sheila Boudreau

Principal Landscape Architect + Planner, SpruceLab Inc.

Sheila has over 28 years of experience, with degrees in Landscape Architecture and Fine Art and a Master of Arts in Planning. She established SpruceLab to prioritize Indigenous voices through their work, where possible, to honour her Mi’kmaq ancestors. She’s also a sessional instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University (TMU) and, previously, the Universities of Toronto and Waterloo. She sits on the Board of Directors for the Canadian Landscape Architecture Foundation and the Board of Advisors for the TMU Urban Water Research Centre.

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“I don’t think design can solve everything,” says Boudreau, “but as designers, I think we can pride ourselves on helping to get things started in a good way.” Early in her career, she learned the importance of prioritizing the land and the waters belonging to Indigenous peoples and First Nations. To give an example of the work she is doing, she shares a recent SpruceLab work project undertaken with an integrated team of architects, engineers, landscape architects and designers reflecting many of values and qualities she stands for. This is the essence of the Keating Channel Pedestrian Bridge on the Toronto Waterfront, aptly named “Nda-nwendaaganag – All My Relations.” At SpruceLab, “we think deeply about the work we take on. We work in a space of prioritizing Indigenous voices wherever possible, as long as we can do Indigenous work with Indigenous peoples and First Nations.”

The Keating Channel Toronto Waterfront project has been a partnership from the very beginning, a bridge crossing the water from the city to the islands, so it was a great project to do. The project goals – a beautiful & distinctive gateway to the Waterfront; connect the City and Villiers Island; sustainable strategies and innovation; and a place for all people – included all of the things we love. The gateway experience is an opportunity to tell a story but how can you do that in a meaningful way?

Our approach was going back to basics and taking a very collaborative approach, starting with understanding the people. All of these things are important in design. Due to the timeline, the design team recommended a huge emphasis on engineering and architecture, together with a design workshop about the bridge. Some of the ideas that came out were around fundamentals, but what was pressing was the idea of balance and honouring the basic teachings of the turtle. They wanted an oasis that felt removed from the city, to feel natural systems on the bridge from water, stone and wood materials. Creating a layering of landscapes and a sense of Oasis.

There is a lot of layering in this project, with the meaning of the turtle being conveyed in different ways. As designers, we are trying to create an opportunity for teachings to be tools for Elders and telling stories. What we hope is that with this narrative and the feeling people take from this bridge will be different with every visit.

Terence Radford – OALA, BCSLA, CSLA 

Landscape Architect and Indigenous Consultant at Trophic Design

Terence is a full member of the OALA and BCSLA with seal. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts and a Master of Landscape Architecture. Terence is a sessional instructor at the University of Toronto Daniels School of Architecture and Design, OALA Representative for the Green Infrastructure Ontario Steering Committee and a CSLA Reconciliation Advisory Committee member.

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After launching his landscape architecture practice in Coburg, Ontario, Radford’s first project was the installation of public artwork in Lake Ontario Park. Its key objective was to mark the site to commemorate the original Mississauga people of Alderville First Nation’s territory in land now known as the City of Kingston, and to make the site a place for sharing and gathering.

The main considerations for public artwork in a public park included durability, maintenance, safety and accessibility. Questions around durability and maintenance included how the artwork would last over an extended period without a lot of maintenance and repairs. For safety, what were the safety considerations and for accessibility, how to make sure people could get to the artwork all the time and would there be easy access with a pathway?

As an Indigenous practitioner, Radford’s firm approaches all of these issues through a belief in the idea of universal design, “design that welcomes and honours All Our Relations, not just the human users.” Design that considers how a site treats water, supports the life of soils, creates a home for plants and animals, and ensures the prosperity of the next seven generations.

What was created was a circular gathering place for the community to assemble on the site. At its heart was a red cedar that is native to the area that elders know occurs everywhere on their land. This was surrounded by sweet grass and four beds denoting the corners of the piece. Radford says he was looking to create a space for all developers to come and gather at the site and to create a habitat for all other beings in the new space. More than a sculpture, it is a landscape layered with teachings co-developed with the local community over the life of the project.

After the completion of the project, Radford signed on to serving as its steward for five years, allowing him to build a relationship, not only with the plants and animals that visit the site, but also the community. In the process, he learned a lot about we deal with naturalized plantings that change and grow and adapt. “It’s not a static ecosystem where every plant designed is in the exact location where it was placed,” he says. “We go annually to harvest all the seeds from the plants and spread them around, to allow those things to choose where they want to be.”

As stewards, we have a responsibility as human beings. This something, Radford says, Elders have taught him repeatedly, engaging with plants, animals, spirits and the other beings who inhabited the land first. It is our responsibility to be thankful and grateful to them, and to pay a critical role in ensuring their health and sustainability. 

Jeroen Spoelstra

Founder of the Life-Centred Design School and Unbeaten Studio

Jeroen Spoelstra is a designer focused on life-centred design, living with his family in a small village in the Spanish Pyrenees. He has three creative projects underway: Unbeaten Studio, the Life-Centred Design School and a mountain bike guiding company. His mission is to help creative professionals transition away from human-centred design to life-centred design and give a new voice to biological ecosystems and non-user communities that, to this point, have been silent in the design process.

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Spoelstra’s design journey began near Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, as a product designer with an interest in sustainability and the social side of design, mainly from the urban perspective. Moving south to Spain, his perspective changed to nature and the rural environment, surrounded by a rich culture and history, and the need to give a design voice to underrepresented communities.

“I felt I wanted to do something for these communities,” he says. With that, his definition of life-centred design (LCD) began to evolve. Away from product design and UX design, LCD grew out of an approach that was actionable and holistic. The dream was to move away from creating commercial value for a single end-user toward creating value for nature, local communities and local economies.

Another defining feature of LCD was the speed of working. As a product designer for a single user, projects were design sprints oblivious of the world around you. By contrast, the LCD world is a slow walk, where you can take the time to see the value of nature and the communities around you. It demands a more holistic approach. LCD is “less design sprints and more design walks,” he says. The idea really resonates with people who ask how they can slow down and change their way of working.

Selected Q&A

LCD represents a new way of transforming our climate-negative behaviours to climate-positive behaviours. Designing ourselves out of the situation and supporting actions to promote long-lasting behavioural change.

Q. A vast majority of design people don’t think this way. How do we find projects using this method?

A. There are several ways to apply this. For one thing, you can create your own persona to include in your design process and the ecosystem of the project. As designers, we have the opportunity not just to design specifically but also to create the design spaces, and be open to listening, observing and hearing better futures.

Q. For those of us who are still “sprinting,” do you have any suggestions for transitioning to life-centred design?

A. Certainly, this is not a time to pause as there is a lot of work to be done. We should be prepared to teach this approach and enable people to hear it. If they are ready to hear it, we should be prepared to translate and allow people to become comfortable with it.

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Things are changing slowly. Right now, there are too many UX designers out there, so the question is, “how do we pivot those designers over to life-centered design”?

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