There are certain times in our lives when we review where we are and look at where we aspire to be. The book ‘Designing your Life’ a New York Times best seller by Burnett and Evans , identifies five Design techniques that will help us steer our lives in the right direction:
1. Be curious – this is a fantastic starting point, and indeed Einstein himself famously said that he had no real talents other than passionate curiosity. Studies have shown that curiosity primes our brain for learning new things, so this is a crucial mindset to invoke from the off.
2. Re-frame problems – there are a number of very well known cognitive biases that can limit our thinking and restrict our choices. By re-framing our problems we can often look at situations in a new light and come up with much better solutions to them.
3. Ask for help – Design and invention are increasingly collaborative processes, and designing your life is no different. Burnett and Evans New York Times best seller, ‘Designing your life’, advocate having an open approach, both to new ideas and insights you can receive from people about new directions, but also in terms of feedback from others on those ideas.
4. Try new things – prototyping is a fundamental part of design thinking. Try new things to test out assumptions.
5. Life is a process – It is much less about the outcome than it is about the way you go about achieving it. This focus on process rather than outcome will allow you to gain something from every eventuality, good or bad.
All this proves how much design is integral to modern life. If we want new and positive futures full of better experiences for ourselves and for others, then it is vital that we educate a society to understand the benefits of design.
View our other journal post in this series here
