A person’s lifeworld is everything that happens in their daily life and what it means to them: where they are, who they are with, who and what they care about, what they do, how they feel and think about it and how all this creates meaning in their life—or not.
Take a moment to consider where you are now. Look, listen, smell, and feel as well. This is your lifeworld. How did you end up there, where will you go next? Think about the things that occupy your mind—emotions, ideas, stories, beliefs, etc. Those are also your lifeworld. Think about how all the places, things, impressions and ideas are woven together and mix while you live you live your life. That is your lifeworld.
Lifeworlds are typically filled with things, places, people, actions, ideas, emotions and judgements as we go about doing what it is that we do in life. Understanding lifeworlds enables us to design meaningful things, services and systems, and testing what we make in lifeworlds provides the ultimate judgment: are the right values actually expressed or did anything get lost along the way?
The lifeworld is where we are happy—or not. Where we feel alive—or not. It really is that simple, even if it is rarely that clear cut: if something makes a positive difference in people’s lifeworlds, it is worth something. If it doesn’t, why bother?
Outer and Inner Worlds
The world we interact with, our experiences of those interactions, and the interpretations we create of them all mutually define each other. These are dynamic processes that unfold in time. As we live, we shape them and they shape us. Sometimes we know what we’re doing, sometimes we are lost. Lifeworlds are messy, but they are the home of the stories of our lives.
Sometimes we have agency, sometimes we don’t. An agent in a situation knows what to do and is able to act effectively. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. Agents feel that they make a difference—because they do. Your ideas about your world and your concrete experiences in it combine into a process of sense-making. What you know determines what you perceive and vice versa. Meaning in life is a dynamic process shaped by purpose, surprises, habits and everything in between.
Societies develop… or not
Most of the societies we live in need a serious makeover. The public and private systems that we interact with are rapidly becoming dysfunctional, unable to deal with the complexities of unfolding global, regional and local networked communities. The complexities at the level of systems, organisations and infrastructures are dazzling and cannot be rationally understood or analysed in useful ways anymore, let alone be predicted or controlled.
These changes force us to rethink all our systems and how they interconnect. Why do they exist? What are they for? What values do they express? From a human perspective, systems are infrastructures for our lifeworlds. If they suck, our lifeworlds suck, and life becomes hard and frustrating. If they embody or empower the the creation of meaning, they make us feel alive, inspired and creative. Creating new systems should start with envisioning lifeworlds: how do all our different activities in life come together in our lifeworlds: where, when, how, and most of all… why? Ultimately, existential questions are rooted in the lifeworlds of people. That is where they become meaningful… or not. Helpful… or not. Inspiring… or not. This is a radical change of perspective: don’t look at systems in terms of what they are supposed to do in isolation, but in terms of how they are experienced in people’s lifeworlds and what they mean for them.
We advocate a lifeworld-based approach, where different challenges come together in a string of moments and situations with many potential interrelationships. When we try to deal with a pandemic without considering current challenges in agriculture or education, we’re missing opportunities. But only when we look at these issues from within lived experiences, we can start to see promising connections and discover new strategies for meaning and integration.
Ground ourselves in meaning
Digital transformation enables decentralisation on a massive scale. New forms of communication, expression, reflection and agency can be created and experimented with very quickly. This makes the digital medium extremely flexible and fluid. We constantly invent new ways of doing things and this tends to create a sense of confusion as trying to keep up with all those changes becomes a permanent challenge. Tech is fast, tech is disruptive, tech means change.
Or does it?
On the surface, yes, it seems so. But on a deeper level, our human needs and values stay the same. We still value frienships, though we way we communicate with our friends has changed. We still value our loved ones, although the way we care for them has changed. Human values, emotions, and life goals don’t change as quickly as technology—if at all, at the deepest level. Digital technologies offer us new tools and infrastructures, but those ultimately address human values, needs, and desires that have been with us for ages . It makes more sense to ground our thinking and our design choices in a deeper understanding of human life than to focus on existing or new forms or technologies that become obsolete very quickly. Understanding who we are and what we care about enables us to make better choices in the design of future-proof systems.
Meaning is not a thing. Nor is it property of things. Nothing is meaningful or meaningless in and of itself. It is essentially a situated and dynamic relationship: something is meaningful or not in a specific situation when it makes a difference in that situation at that moment for something or someone. People find things meaningful if they address there needs, desires, beliefs, values, etc. in situations. Three lines of poetry can be extremely meaningful in a psychologically dark moment, but annoying when you’re trying to catch a train and your daily poetry app decides to notify you on the screen of your phone as you’re trying to find the right platform.
In other words, meaning happens in lifeworlds: specific situations, specific moments.
Values are expressed in lifeworlds
As we live, we learn. We learn how to do things, how to make sense of the world, of each other and of ourselves, and we learn what makes us feel good and what we find important in our lifeworld, in the world, and in life. When we realise that a certain aspect of the world is generally a good thing and we want to see more of it in the world, we have discovered a value that we care about.
Values are ultimately characteristics or features of our lifeworld that we find important. We want more of them in the world, we want to make sure they stay intact, and we are willing to sacrifice for it: time, money, our lives, sometimes even our life. This is actually a bit tricky. What if there is something that we care about, but we don’t want to sacrifice in order to nurture or cultivate it. Is that a real value? Or a lip service value?
When the lifeworld is our starting point as well as our end point for design and innovation, we don’t work from values and principles, we work towards them. Values and principles are only interesting if they can ultimately be experienced in the lifeworld—directly or through interpretation and sense making.
Also, every product, service or system expresses values. Sometimes this is explicit and intentional (cars are carefully designed to be safe and reliable), but sometimes there are (desirable or not) side effects. Many people love how a commute from work to home also gives them a private moment to mentally make the transition from a professional to a personal environment. Tables are designed to put things on, but most of them will hold a person as well when a lightbulb needs to be replaced.