DesignShift Practice Session: From Influencing Nature to Influenced by Nature
In February 2025, we hosted our third DesignShifts Practice Session. This was an opportunity to move from theory to practice and explore some of the DesignShifts in community. In this session, we explored how we can use nature as a guide in our work and life.
Session overview
We used to design tools based on the material we had at hand. We used to let the wind guide how we constructed buildings. Our design choices (and life) used to be influenced by the natural, local environment. Now, we’re creating global solutions and implementing technologies that help us (momentarily) override nature. The price we pay in disconnection and destruction.
What would it look like to shift from design decisions that influence nature to nature influencing our design decisions? How can we let nature guide us? We’re part of nature. Not the other way around.
In the session, we reflected on questions, held tensions, and practiced shifting our practices, perspectives, and the purpose of our work.
For this session, DesignShifts partnered with Jayavanthi Gayathri
She’s a User experience designer, researcher & foresight practitioner.
Nature relationship through connection
We started by connecting with each other and nature. In small groups, we explored how connected we are to nature. We used the image below as a prompt for reflection. We were inspired by this resource for using 5 pathways to connect with nature.
DesignShifts: Design & Material,
Behavioural & Societal, and Systemic
The session brought to light shifts that happens at different levels.
Design & Material Shifts:
Circular thinking: Focus on repairability and lifecycle sustainability (e.g., bikes, natural fibers).
Nature-based systems: Designing buildings, products, and infrastructure that adapt rather than dominate.
Biodegradable & regenerative materials: Encouraging materials that work with natural cycles.
Behavioural & Societal Shifts:
Living with natural cycles: Aligning waking hours with sunlight, eating seasonally, adapting homes to climate.
Learning from nature’s resilience: Embracing adaptation instead of resisting change.
Respecting bodily cycles: Considering human rhythms (e.g., women’s cycles, circadian rhythm) in work and lifestyle design.
Community-centred approaches: Decentralized, cooperative structures inspired by plant ecosystems.
Broader Systemic Shifts:
Reframing disaster response: Preventing harm while understanding natural systems rather than controlling them.
Water & biodiversity management: Using nature-inspired approaches like tree planting, species diversity, and water-sensitive design.
Homeostasis as a model: Designing systems that prevent extremes rather than react to them.
Street & city planning: Rethinking urban environments to integrate nature rather than displace it.
Strange Garden: Bringing nature into our space.
Even behind our screens, we can look for ways to bring nature closer to us. This is the Strange Garden we created together in the session. It was a way to find objects in our homes that brings our closer to nature.
Links and Resources
A few resources related to designing with nature. Take your time with these resources. They are not be be consumed but rather to be experiences.
Breathing with the forest (experience)
Breathing with the forest (experience)
Adaptive Ecosystems (book)
The Lo-TEK Institute: Nature-based technologies (book and course)
