Designing Your Life
By Bill Burnett & Dave Evans
What do you want to do with your life? This is the question posed by Silicon Valley design innovators Bill Burnett (Executive Director of Stanford’s Design Program) & Dave Evans (Co-Founder of Electronic Arts). But they put a twist on the answer by giving you the tools to tackle this age old question with design thinking. According to Burnett and Evans this question can have a similar treatment to most every problem in the business world if you break it down into tactics like reframing, prototyping and mind-mapping. Taking from their popular Stanford course that rose to global appeal they bring these lessons to the pages of Designing Your Life.
“A well-designed life is a life that is generative—it is constantly creative, productive, changing, evolving, and there is always the possibility of surprise. You get out of it more than you put in. There is a lot more than “lather, rinse, repeat” in a well-designed life.”
Thoughts
Design thinking is something I’ve heard in business articles, in job descriptions, and every now and then when someone from schools like Stanford try to impress people. The process of design thinking is the bedrock of some really innovative companies in the tech space. Burnett and Evans have applied this methodology to a lot of the normal questions us simpletons ask ourselves every day in the shower like “what makes me happy?” While a lot of these concepts are fascinating, and in the moment make you question your values and your place on Earth their suggestions are just something I won’t be doing any time soon. For example, the little slider scale exercise they ask you to make to understand if your life is in alignment? Hard pass. I think the book, and what it sets out to accomplish makes this a business book about design thinking, but offers little value in the form of helping your life or providing profound insights. Not bad, not great.
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