What Is Life-Centered Design?

A First Encounter with a Design Framework That Goes Beyond the Human

This afternoon, I had a meeting with Taylor Kaus from the Life-Centered Design School, and she introduced me to a concept that, frankly, kind of blew my socks off: Life-Centered Design. It's essentially an updated, expanded way of thinking beyond the Human-Centered Design (HCD) that’s been the dominant model in UX for at least the last decade. The idea resonated with me on a gut level, and as I sat with it, I started realizing how profound the shift in perspective really is.

At the end of the day, Life-Centered Design seems to be about incorporating the externalities of product or service development—the effects that are often ignored or treated as someone else's problem. Most design conversations revolve around improving the experience for users. We ask how we can make something better, more efficient, more meaningful—for people. But we rarely ask how our design decisions ripple outward beyond that immediate interaction. Life-Centered Design reframes the conversation: it’s not just about users, or even humans, but life itself in a broader, more abstract sense. Living systems. Ecosystems. Future generations. Beings who can't give feedback in a user interview.

I’ll admit I was initially confused by the terminology. I was coming from a deeply humanistic lens, trained to think of human beings as the center of design work. So I heard “life” and assumed it was still talking about human life. But this framework pushes that boundary outward. It includes rivers, aquifers, pollinators, soil health, even social systems that may not show up in analytics dashboards but are still shaped by the things we make.

As I understand it, this approach is seeking to address the same root problem that things like carbon credits and carbon taxes try to handle in economic systems. Our current systems don’t account for external costs. A classic example: when a company prices a gallon of gasoline, they calculate it based on production, transportation, and taxes—but they don’t factor in the long-term healthcare costs caused by pollution or the climate impacts that result from burning fossil fuels. Carbon credit systems were introduced to try and correct for that, to artificially “price in” some of those long-term damages. Life-Centered Design, to me, feels like a design-world equivalent. It asks: how can we account for indirect, long-range, and non-obvious effects of what we create?

One of the examples we talked about was data centers. I brought up a real-world case from Tucson, Arizona, where the city council recently voted unanimously against building a new data center. The reason? Water. Data centers require massive amounts of water for cooling, and Tucson has been in a drought for more than 20 years—the worst in over a thousand. People keep moving there, and the water shortage keeps getting worse. From a Human-Centered Design perspective, you might say a new data center could benefit Tucson economically. It could diversify the economy, bring in new jobs, and so on. In that case, “the public” becomes the user. But if we shift the lens to Life-Centered Design, we’re forced to ask other questions: how would this impact the shrinking aquifer under the city? How would it affect fragile desert ecosystems? How would it burden the neighborhoods near the construction site, especially low-income or historically under-resourced ones?

The power of Life-Centered Design is that it doesn’t reject Human-Centered Design—it builds on it. It challenges us to expand who we think of as a stakeholder. Not just the person clicking the button, but the tree whose habitat might be destroyed, the river that gets polluted, or the community that bears the brunt of invisible costs.

Final Thoughts

There’s a humility baked into this framework that I find refreshing. It resists the urge to optimize endlessly for convenience or profit and asks us to slow down—to think in broader terms, across longer time horizons, and with greater accountability to the world around us. I’m still processing all of this, but I can already feel it shifting how I approach my work.

If you’re interested in learning more, I recommend checking out Life-Centered Design School. It's a small but growing community of practitioners rethinking what good design means in a time of ecological crisis and interconnected systems.

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