Greenpeace Persona Case Study
Using a Life-Centered Design Approach
Overview
I worked with Greenpeace International, and specifically the Planet 4 team, as a UX designer. There I introduced the concept of Life-Centered Design. In this project specifically, I re-examined the key users, both human and non-human impacted by Planet 4. Read the Medium article 'Rethinking Users in Planet 4: A Life-Centered Approach to People, Nature, and Communities' to learn more about how and why we decided to rethink our users on the frontend and backend.
Article preview
Several years ago, the Planet 4 team created Archetypes to help us understand who our users were on the frontend (any visitor to our websites) and backend (Greenpeace employees who use Planet 4). These Archetypes hadn’t been actively used or updated in a while, so we decided it was time to revisit our users to better understand their current needs and behaviors, helping to inform the future of our product.
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We took a life-centered design approach to this project and identified key human, non-human, and community users. Life-centered design, according to the Life-Centered Design School, is defined as “a design philosophy and approach that goes beyond human needs and puts all life at the centre of our creations, it advocates for biological ecosystems and non-user communities that have never had a voice in the design process. The long-term goal is to restore natural ecosystems by creating new relationships between nature and society.” We decided to use a life-centered design approach because we wanted to better understand the broader impact on all living systems. By prioritizing the needs of human and non-human users, as well as the communities and ecosystems impacted by our platform, we aimed to create more sustainable, equitable, and holistic solutions.
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Water as a user
As part of this life-centered design work, we identified water as a non-human user of the Planet 4 platform. In this short video, I voice water’s perspective to highlight its connection to digital sustainability and data use.
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