Select a book report provided to date and explain how the material presented hel
ID: 364957 • Letter: S
Question
Select a book report provided to date and explain how the material presented helps you to better understand design thinking.
Bill Burnett and Dave Evan’s book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life, is set out as an instructive guide to harmonizing the relationship between the reader’s entrenched passion and their entrepreneurial careers. Along with useful tools to help analyze a variety of aspects about ourselves, we are given short case studies throughout the book to help the readers gain a better understanding of how each tool and mindset works by the generation of empathy; whether it is for Michael (the civil engineer – Wayfinding in Chapter 3), or for Clara (who found her encore career through her passion – Prototyping in Chapter 6), or many other characters mentioned. Readers are guided by activities like the Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard and the Good Time Journal Exercise to develop a deeper understanding and realization of what works and what doesn’t in their personal and professional life. The intrinsic value to the readers when completing these exercises is to find possible directions to head to in their lives with the prospect of increasing their happiness.
This book is highly recommended to those who would want to explore alternatives to their current and/or potential careers. The compilations of tools are catered to a wide demographic mix of readers and tailored to harness their individual psychographic uniqueness. The overall theme of the book is to understand, learn and align yourself with what makes you content, and using the embodiment of your contentment to guide your career.
5 Useful Ideas
Dysfunctional Belief versus Reframe
Plastered across all the chapters in the book, Burnett and Evans embed small pieces of critical advice for readers to change our perspective of certain issues to get a better outcome with the tools. For example, in Chapter 5 – Design Your Lives (specifically on page 90), instead of “…figure[ing] out [your] best possible life, mak[ing] a plan, and then execut[ing] it”, we should embrace the thought of ‘multiple great lives (and plans)’ with the ability to decide between the alternatives to move forward (Burnett and Evans, 2016). In other words, there isn’t a single perfect way of life but instead many alternatives that may be intertwined. The reason why these recommendations are a useful idea is because the mindset matters in design thinking. It allows us to explore and harness the audacity to relax us from judgments (our own or society’s paradigms); as stated in Chapter 6 as one of the rules for brainstorming, the readers are encouraged to “defer judgment and do not censor ideas” (Burnett and Evans, 2016).
The Odyssey Plan
We are introduced to the Odyssey Plan in Chapter 5 as a means to discover alternative lives we may live in the next 5 years. My assumption is that many people I know, including those I know outside the network of academia, have instilled in their mind a fortified plan of where they have to be in the coming 5 years. Most of them have engraved such a plan that excludes the dreams of what they wanted to be when they were younger – which in my most humble opinion is rather awful. For the people that may have such regiment in their mind, by just sketching three alternatives ideas (centered around what you currently do, what you would do if you couldn’t do what you currently do, and what you would do should neither money nor image hassle you in any way), you can develop an exploration of your lives. This is important because we assume that there is only one good thing, derived from the thought that there can only be one and only one of something. Ultimately, this exercise encourages readers to look deep within them, to think outside of the box, and to find multiple solutions.
You Are Here
The first chapter of the book heavily emphasizes the need to know where you are in life and how you are doing. This is important because you need to know where you are in your life to know what to improve or what to maintain. Through the visualization of the Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard and a genuine analysis of your own life at this point in time, you are able to discover what you should work on and if it is complex (tangled with many issues that ripples through one action to another). A journey has a start and an end, but without fully understanding the start of it all, how can we know what to improve and by the end of it all know how far we’ve really come? Therefore, understanding where you are now is crucial to the process of designing your life with a design thinking approach.
Flow: Engagement on Steroids
One of the clues that we should pay attention to – in reference to figuring out where you are going without a specific destination (Wayfinding) – is this euphoric experience where you are at peace while fully immersed in an activity, otherwise known as flow. This is a useful concept because although we know what we enjoy doing, this type of activity can be one of the strong indications of what entrepreneurial careers or pursuits we should focus a little more on. While investigating when my engagement is on steroids, I find that the two activities that give me a sense of ecstasy is when I am creating a scrapbook page or when I am cooking. I do the said activities not because I love doing it, but it keeps me at ease while pushing me to utilize my skills. By finding that Zen moment, we are able to curiously develop an alternative to what we can focus on, other than our passion(s) and hobby (-ies).
The Good Time Journal Exercise
Although I wished I could create my very own Good Time Journal for the presentation and book report, I am very likely to try doing so afterwards because I think this concept is highly useful. Like the observation activities we do as a class-time activity (i.e. on the commons), this is a more emotional observation of what we enjoy and didn’t enjoy in our day-to-day activities. By discovering what it is that makes us happy and what makes us wish we could be on a paid-expense vacation instead of wherever we are, we can uncover what skills we have that are tied to our emotional and mental state of mind.
3 Most Surprising Ideas
You and Your Life Design Team
To figure out which of the alternative lives is “high on resources, likability, confidence, and coherence”, the recommended thing to do is to share those alternative lives with someone else other than you; preferably, your Life Design Team or the group of people you are reading the book with. This is surprising to me because when I read the suggestion the first time, I thought it was ironic to share your plans of life that was intended to help yourself, but with reference to somebody else’s suggestions. But when I think of it more, one of the main purposes of sharing these alternatives with someone else is similar to how we would consult our product or service ideas with our consumers in the IDEO’s prototyping process – but in this case, it would be people who may interact with us for an extended period of time rather than consumers.
Anchor Problems versus Gravity Problems
Problems are just problems right? Apparently not. The difference between an anchor problem and a gravity problem is that an anchor problem are actionable, yet hard problems that has been an issue for a long period of time, whereas a gravity problem are circumstances where it goes against the laws of nature should we address and try to change it. The theory of the two types of problems helps us categorize what we should try to ‘reframe’ and what we let go. This is surprising because I had never thought or come across more than one idea of what a problem can be defined into, and how reframing how we go about the solution can imminently help us design forward.
Never choose your first solution to any problems
In chapter four, we are introduced to two philosophies that the authors suggest life designers live by, one of which is to never choose your first solution to any problem. Burnett and Evans insinuate that lazy minds tend to quickly remove any problems promptly by surrounding the initial idea with “positive chemicals to make us “fall in love” with them. Although it is suggested that the solutions to our woes in life can be derived from multiple different ideas, I am surprised that the authors try to prevent us from going with the initial, possibly gut-induced solution.
Explanation / Answer
After reading the case mention here I can determine following things to explain design thinking:
Bill Burnett and Dave Evan’s book, Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived Joyful Life, is set out as an instructive guide to harmonizing the relationship between the reader’s entrenched passion and their entrepreneurial careers.
There are many useful tools available which analyze the activities of health/work/play/love. It understand the happiness index of life.
Dysfunctional Belief versus Reframe explain us to change our perspective of certain issues related to designing of our lives. We should thought of multiple great lives to decide move forward..
Mindset matters in design thinking which allows the audacity to relax us from judgments.
The Odyssey Plan is to discover alternative lives we may live. When we were younger many things comes in mindset by sketching three alternatives ideas (centered around what you currently do, what you would do if you couldn’t do what you currently do, and what you would do should neither money nor image hassle you in any way), you can develop an exploration of your lives.
The important thing in our life is to know what to improve and what to maintain. Through the visualization of the Health/Work/Play/Love Dashboard and a genuine analysis of your own life at this point in time, you are able to discover what you should work on and if it is complex (tangled with many issues that ripples through one action to another).
Therefore, understanding where you are now is crucial to the process of designing your life with a design thinking approach.
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