Johns Hopkins University: Life Design & Sustainability


Smiti Nathan is the CEO and Founder of Anthico LLC and a former Assistant Director of Life Design at the Life Design Lab of Johns Hopkins University. Her pedagogical approach to life design heavily centers values-based and interdisciplinary approaches. She writes about her experiences on her blog, Life Design Log. 


Sustainability is a term that is used across fields, organizations, and spaces. The students that I worked with while at Johns Hopkins University were deeply interested in their relationship with themselves, the environment, and the world. In collaboration with the Johns Hopkins University’s Environmental Science and Studies Program and The Earth and Planetary Sciences Department, I taught a course called, “Designing Your Sustainable Life.”

The course focused on the following three areas:

  1. Defining sustainability by interrogating transdisciplinary research and literature,

  2. Ideating on the impact students want to have in the world, and

  3. Prototyping sustainable actions students can implement in their lives.

and had the following learning outcomes:

  1. Identify tangible actions they can implement in their own lives

  2. Evaluate a diversity of ways to make a broader impact through the work they might pursue

  3. Generate a personal definition of sustainability, while being cognizant of other definitions

Core to the course and activities were intentionally exploring what sustainability means to these students and how to have a bias towards action with those definitions and values. 

For more information on the course, check out the following blog post that details the full curriculum, activities, and learnings:

https://lifedesignlog.com/2021-designing-your-sustainable-life-course/