Author
Bill Burnett
The Stanford design teacher who turned the methods of product design on the question of how to build a working life.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Bill Burnett is the executive director of the Design Program at Stanford University, where he teaches design to undergraduate and graduate students. Before teaching, he spent years in industry as a product designer, including work at Apple.
With Dave Evans he developed the Designing Your Life course at Stanford, which applies design thinking to the choices students face about work and life after university, and the two co-founded the Stanford Life Design Lab to teach and develop the method.
Their book Designing Your Life (2016) brought the course to a general readership and has been widely translated. A follow-up, Designing Your Work Life, applied the same tools to the job a reader already has rather than the next one.
The signature
Burnett writes as a designer who distrusts answers reached by thinking alone. Where much career advice asks the reader to look inward until the right path appears, his method asks for something small to be built, tried and learned from: problems are reframed until they can be acted on, several options are kept alive at once, and failure is read as information about the design rather than a verdict on the designer.