Applied experiments & real-world projects.
DesignShifters Archetypes: new roles responses in a shifting world
The DesignShifter archetypes invites designers and change makers to embrace new roles responses as we face climate change, inequality, and technological disruption.
Nature Dates
Simple practices for re-membering our relationship with nature
Nature Dates is an experiment for re-membering our relationship with nature. It features simple prompts, reflections, and activities that can be done alone or together, inviting people to slow down, pay attention, and cultivate a deeper relationship with the living world. Whether it's spending thirty minutes watching an ant, going on a weekly nature date, listening to the soundscape of a forest, or noticing flowers growing through cracks in the pavement, each practice offers a small way to reconnect with nature in everyday life.
Designing Otherwise:
A cohort learning journey exploring a better future for and through design
Designing Otherwise is the first DesignShifts learning cohort, a seven-week learning journey that gives designers, researchers, culture-builders, and practitioners the space, community, and resources to explore what it means to advance a non-extractive design practice in response to today’s social, ecological, and systemic challenges.
Together, we explore what it means to unlearn design as a tool for productivity, extraction, and profit, and begin practicing design as a way to cultivate healing, liberation, and reconnection with ourselves, each other, and the living world.
Shifting Together:
A practice space to co-create the future we all want.
Once a month, we host virtual or in-person events to explore small steps we can take to shift towards a better future. These session focus on exploration and are created in partnership with various organizations, companies, and individuals.
In these community sessions, we explore thinking about, being with, and shaping the Shifts as a collective force.
ABOUT
Through The Making Lab we help organizations and communities navigate systemic transition — designing for root causes, shared power, and collective wellbeing, rather than efficiency, growth, and output.
Through collaborative projects, we develop tools, systems, and experiences that demonstrate what post-extractive design can look like in action.