Design Prinicples for Life and Play
Portuguese tiles; Credit: Emily Giacomini
You may be familiar with Designing Your Life, the 2016 New York Times best-selling book by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, written to bring more joy to readers as they intentionally create a life they’ll love. Since then, the authors have gone on to publish Designing Your Work Life in 2020 and most recently Designing Your NEW Work Life in October 2021 to address shifts related to the pandemic. For Burnett and Evans, both professors at Stanford’s Design School, applying principles of design thinking to life planning to support their students seemed natural and the rest of us are now better off because they put pen to paper.
Being familiar with basic tenets of Design Thinking gives us some powerful practical tools for life. These are relevant for people in many situations, such as choosing or advancing a career, pursuing energizing hobbies or volunteer work, or considering how to invest their skills in worthwhile projects in retirement. I’ve found them helpful for gaining a new perspective and taking action with a positive outlook.
Philosophy of Design Thinking
· Be curious
· Try stuff
· Reframe problems
· Know it’s a process
· Ask for help
1) Be curious
Asking open-ended questions can shed light on matters that seem stuck:
· How did the process come to be like this?
· For what am I grateful in this situation?
· If I didn’t have limited resources (eg. money, time, physical space or items) what would I try? Consider this question separately for each resource.
2) Try stuff
· What could I achieve in the morning if I got up 30 minutes earlier?
· What could I learn about my town if I pretended I were a tourist here next Saturday?
· How would the atmosphere shift if we started the next team meeting with each of us sharing a one-word check-in and leaving with a one-word check-out to describe how we are feeling?
3) Reframe problems
· “I’m old” becomes, “I’ll never be younger than I am today.”
· “She’s hard to work with” becomes, “I can use my strength of empathy to connect with her.”
· “We’re short-staffed” becomes, “We only do projects that bring clear value to our clients.”
4) Know it’s a process
· Innovation is iterative. Today you can build on the steps you took yesterday (if they worked) or take a different tack (if they didn’t!)
· We’re free to explore. Be alert to feedback from others and note the impact of your prototypes to adjust along the way.
· Be gracious with others and yourself if an experiment “fails”. How will it direct your next steps?
5) Ask for help
Everyone sees things from a different perspective.
· “How else could we approach this?”
· “What have we missed?”
· “What one piece could we alter?”
Challenge your thoughts with one of these design thinking approaches the next time you’re tempted to be resigned to a situation or even if things are “just fine” and you’d like to create a life that’s better than that!