Concept
Life Design
Life design is Bill Burnett and Dave Evans's approach of applying design thinking to a career and a life: starting from where you are, reframing the problem, generating several possible paths and testing them with small prototypes before committing to one.
Burnett and Evans developed the approach while teaching a course at Stanford University that applied the methods of its design program to students' lives, and set it out in Designing Your Life (2016). Their premise is that a career is not a puzzle with one correct answer waiting to be discovered, but a design problem with many good answers, each of which can be tried out. Designers, they point out, do not think their way to a finished product; they build, test and change. The approach borrows a handful of designer habits: curiosity, a bias to action, reframing a stuck problem, awareness of the process and working with other people. It starts with an honest look at the present: a simple dashboard of four areas, health, work, play and love, showing how full each one feels. It then separates real problems from what the authors call gravity problems, circumstances you cannot change and can only accept or work around. From there, the steps are to sketch several possible lives, talk to people already living them and try small experiences before any big decision. The method replaces the search for one right answer with a series of cheap, informative tests.
A real-life example
Murat, a 34-year-old English teacher in Konya, felt stuck and kept asking whether he should "finally do something else". He started with the dashboard: work was half full, play almost empty, health and love fine. That turned the question from "What is my true calling?" into "How do I bring more of what I enjoy into the next year?" He sketched three possible paths, asked an instructional designer and a translator what their days were like, and spent a weekend helping a friend design an online course before deciding what to try next.
How to use it
- 1Rate your health, work, play and love from empty to full, without judging the result.
- 2Separate the problems you can act on from gravity problems you can only accept or work around.
- 3Write two or three possible next steps and test the most interesting one with a conversation or a small experience before deciding.