Author
Dave Evans
The Silicon Valley veteran who co-created Stanford's Designing Your Life course with Bill Burnett.
1 book on BookYol
The story and the impact
Dave Evans is a lecturer in the Design Program at Stanford University and, with Bill Burnett, a co-founder of the Stanford Life Design Lab. Before teaching, he spent many years in the technology industry, including at Apple, and he was one of the co-founders of the video game company Electronic Arts.
With Burnett he developed the Designing Your Life course, which teaches students to apply design thinking to their choices about work and life after university, and the two later adapted the method for adults at every stage of a career.
Their book Designing Your Life (2016) carried the course to readers far beyond Stanford, and a follow-up, Designing Your Work Life, turned the same tools on the job a reader already has.
The signature
The method Evans shares with Burnett treats a stuck career as a design problem with many good answers rather than a puzzle with one. Its most distinctive move is social: instead of deciding alone, the reader is sent to talk to people already living the options under consideration and asked to hear their stories, so that a big choice rests on what others have actually experienced.