Designing Your Life with Design Thinking

(Life Design Through Design Thinking)

Introduction

• Focus on designing life using design thinking methodology.
• Key figures: Dave Evans (co-founder of Life Design Lab at Stanford).
• Purpose: Class to help figure out what you want to grow into next.

Core Concepts of Design Thinking

• Reframes: Essential for approaching problems differently.
  • Curiosity: Maintain child-like curiosity.
  • Reframing: Most people solve the wrong problems.
  • Radical collaboration: Solutions often involve others.
  • Mindfulness of process: Different times for generating ideas vs. converging/testing.
  • Bias action: Plans often change with reality.

Why Design Thinking for Life

• Observations of students getting stuck and lacking tools to get unstuck.
• Dysfunctional beliefs analyzed:
  • Single passion myth.
  • Pressure of "being late" in life.
  • Pursuit of being the "best version" leading to unrealistic goals.

Key Ideas from Design Thinking

1. Connecting the Dots for Meaning

   • Link who you are, what you believe, and what you do.
   • Write a work view and a life view.

2. Dealing with Gravity Problems

   • Problems you cannot change; acceptance is key.
   • Design process works only on problems you can change.

3. Multiple Lives Approach

   • Explore multiple possible lives or careers.
   • Ideate at least three plans for your future:
     • Plan for current career.
     • Plan if current career disappears.
     • Wild card plan, if money and judgment were no constraints.
   • Realization of multiple interesting life paths.

4. Prototyping Your Life

   • Build prototypes of life ideas.
   • Two methods: Prototype conversations and experiences.

5. Making Good Decisions

   • Process: Gather options, narrow down, make a choice, let go and move on.
   • Be open to luck and serendipity.
   • Avoid choice overload by limiting options.
   • Use gut feelings for decision-making.
   • Happiness from irreversible decisions.

Conclusion

• Encouragement to adopt design thinking principles.
• Emphasize on curiosity, conversation, and experimentation.
• Testimonies to the effectiveness of the method in increasing creativity and confidence among students.