The Making Lab
The Making Lab brings the DesignShifts approach into real-world projects. We work with organisations, communities, and practitioners to explore complex challenges, imagine alternatives, and build capacities, systems, relationships, tools, and practices that move us toward healing, structural equity, and collective well-being.
Many of the people and organizations we work with already know they want to shift: toward more care, more shared power, a different relationship to people and place. What’s missing is often not the knowledge, but rather the right conditions and relationships to get from intention to practice. By looking at the structures holding us back and the future we want to bring into being, we co-create the structures, tools, capacities, and relationships needed to shift towards a different future together.
Our work sits at the intersection of design, ecology, social science, and economics. Each initiative is guided by the seven dimensions of DesignShifts and shaped by the people it is made with and for.
What kind of world are we designing into existence?
CURRENT INITIATIVES
CURRENT INITIATIVES
DesignShifters Archetypes: new roles responses in a shifting world
The DesignShifter archetypes invites us all to embrace new roles responses as we face climate change, inequality, and technological disruption.
It’s a frame for understanding what roles we want to leave behind while embracing new responses that support a different future.
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.
Nature Dates:
Simple practices for re-membering our relationship with nature
Nature Dates is a field guide 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.
