Wishing for your New Year, New Me? Whether you’re looking for a personal rebrand, an academic pivot, or a self-discovery journey, Stanford professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans can help. Founders of the Life Design Lab at the Stanford d.school and professors of the one of the most popular courses at Stanford, Burnett and Evans help students apply the principles of design thinking to create personally fulfilling lives.

“A coherent life is one lived in such a way that you can clearly connect the dots between three things: who you are, what you believe, what you are doing.” — Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life

The essence of design thinking, as it applies to life design

If you’ve taken a HCI course at CMU, you’ve probably had some exposure to design thinking. First introduced in Herbert A. Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial (1969) and later popularized by Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO (early 2000s), design thinking is a powerful tool across industry applications.

Design Thinking Process (courtesy Nielsen Norman Group), with steps of empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test, and implement

Design Thinking Process (c/o Nielsen Norman Group)

Design thinking is an iterative process of understanding the problem you’re trying to solve, exploring and prototyping potential solutions, and materializing those solutions to implement. Life itself is a continuous improvement problem, thus lending itself well to design thinking.

“Life is all about growth and change… It’s not about some destination. It’s not about answering the question once and for all and then it’s all done… What people need is a process—a design process—for figuring out what they want, whom they want to grow into, and how to create a life they love.” — Bill Burnett & Dave Evans, Designing Your Life

Applying the designing thinking process to life design, Burnett and Evans created a series of personal reflection, ideation, and experimentation exercises for their Designing Your Life course. Such exercises include:

  1. Gauging your balance of health, work, play, and love in your life
  2. Reflecting on your existing Workview and Lifeview, identifying where the two complement and clash
  3. Measuring your energy and engagement levels of your daily activities
  4. Mind-mapping the activities with the highest energy and engagement
  5. Formulating 5-year Odyssey Plans based on different versions of yourself
  6. Brainstorming & prototyping conversations and experiences to test assumptions in the Odyssey Plans

Ready to give it a go?

Luckily, you don’t have to go all the way to Stanford! There are two great resources you can try this semester.