Life's Principles are a valuable tool for User Experience designers in any industry. Nature has had millions of years to experiment, run tests, respond, and repeat to create optimal conditions for long-term survival of both individual species and their ecosystems. Earth's system of trial and error and continuous optimization is not unlike UX research and testing processes. Considering just a few fundamental basic principles can be a helpful exercise to incorporate into your own solutions.
The Principles are broken up into two main categories, with three primary strategies each.
Life adapts and evolves
1. Life is locally attuned and responsive
Organisms have all kinds of adaptations that enable them to sense and respond to their surrounding environment. Our own five senses are often used in tandem to help us respond accordingly, for instance, when you see and hear a car coming, and can move out of the way quickly when signals are sent throughout the circulatory system, moving your body to react. This is a useful principle to remember when designing for accessibility in particular - even for those who don’t have specific accessibility needs, it’s always more optimal for all users to design a task or user interface in a way that does not rely on one sense alone. (For instance, phone alarms that utilize both sound and vibration.)
2. Life runs on a cyclic process
In nature, things run on a series of cycles - seasons, days, the cycle of life from birth to death and decomposition that makes way for new life. We grow easily accustomed to predictable repeating patterns. We regularly leverage this knowledge in UX by using familiar info architecture and user flows in website design.
3. Life is resilient
Nature uses strategies like redundancy, decentralization, and diversity to help it recover from a disturbance. In our own bodies we have two kidneys, among other things that come in pairs. We use backup electrical generators and battery-powered flashlights in emergencies, escalators become stairs when they break. Smart investors diversify their portfolios. Especially when it really counts, there should always be a backup plan for accomplishing your task in order to minimize disruption.
Life creates conditions conducive to life
4. Life optimizes rather than maximizes
This will feel familiar to UX designers and architects, as we are constantly advocating for continual optimization. Often we are asked to accommodate many competing interests, from marketing and sales, to branding and legal teams, to engineering, and beyond. While these departments are also users we need to solve for, advocating for the end user typically means leading them to a desired result with the least amount of friction possible, which may also mean pushing back against attempts to maximize that hinder the goal of optimizing.
Another strategy for optimization consistent in nature is that form fits function, and function serves more than one purpose - for instance, rabbit ears that aid both in better hearing and temperature regulation. This is a useful consideration when managing competing interests - working within limitations and prioritizing function will lead to the most optimized solutions. This is also why in web design we use the "mobile first" rule, forcing us to work within a restricted space before we try to maximize for a desktop screen.
5. Life uses benign manufacturing
This principle highlights how nature can produce a variety of forms for different purposes using only available natural materials, without damaging the rest of the ecosystem. Even if not designing a physical product, the general concept of working with the materials and within the existing environment can be the most optimal solution. Of course this is less applicable when the existing environment is less than optimal and could use more disruptive solutions - as creatives and innovators, we will always want to disrupt - but we must also consider who may be negatively impacted by those disruptions, and if they can be properly cared for to help them adapt.
6. Life is interdependent
Nothing in nature exists in a vacuum - all organisms provide some benefit to the larger ecosystem they belong to, and species become stronger the more they can form beneficial relationships. This is another way we can optimize by working within our existing ecosystem - looking at restrictions not necessarily as limitations, but finding opportunity within them. As I previously mentioned, leveraging familiar patterns and using available resources, forging partnerships that can fill in gaps in knowledge or expertise, using proven tools and frameworks - put simply, finding ways to avoid reinventing the wheel - are effective for getting to better solutions more efficiently.