Applying Design Thinking principles to career and life

Sathish Seshadri

17 March, 2017

Designing Your Life

What we intend to cover…

• Why should we design our lives?

• What’s Design Thinking

• Why Design Thinking for life?

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

- Mark Twain

What do I want to be when I grow up?

Only 20% of the population can identify a singular passion (Bill Damon, Path to Purpose)

What you study determines your future?What’s your goal?

Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?Life is not an equation to be solved.

So, lets build our way forward by designing our lives!

Life is a creative adventure to be engaged.

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

― Henry Ford

Problem Solving

• Ways of problem solving

• Engineering thinking

• Business thinking

• Design thinking

• Solving Wicked problems

• Success criteria is ambiguous and change in time.

• Once you have solved it you cant reuse

• Human problems

• Build our way forward

Design Thinking

Human Centric

Ambiguous

Tangible

Iterative

Re-design

Designing your life

• Solve for Future that hasn’t occurred yet

• Somehow figure out the way forward

• Only way is to build your way forward and not analyze your way forward

• Define – problem find before we problem solve

• Do one step at a time to become a better version of you.

Designer Mindset

• Curiosity

• Reframing

• Mindfulness to the process – don’t get ahead of the moment

• Radically collaborate

• Bias towards action

• False best is the enemy of the available better

• There is more aliveness in us than what we could achieve in one lifetime

The unexamined life is not worth living!- Socrates

Acknowledgement - Ideas from the book: