Applying Design Thinking to Life | Wow Essays Reviews

5 min readNov 19, 2021

In the book Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life, Bill Barnett teaches people to apply design thinking principles (product or experience improvement strategies) to their personal and professional lives.

Design thinking is a problem-solving system that uses mental, creative, and analytical skills. Typically, designers consider problems such as:

A company is looking for the next big idea (a new product or service).
A government organization is trying to get people to save energy or water (a social problem).
A technology company wants a user-friendly design for one of its gadgets or software.

However, design thinking can also be used by the average person. Together with wowessays, in this article, I analyze design thinking and advise those who want to improve their lives with it.

A brief overview of design thinking

It includes five steps.

1. Empathize

The designer puts people and their needs first. So the first step in the process is to understand the problem from the end user’s point of view.

You try to understand how the consumer behaves and why, as well as what matters to them. The ways are observation and interviews.

2. Identify.

With the information gathered in the empathy phase, you have the tools to understand the real problem. In the definition phase, those needs and ideas that have been discovered are cataloged. We now clearly define the real problem.

3. Call out in the imagination.

In this stage, the designer uses creativity to generate as many ideas as possible to solve the problem. The goal is not to find the “right answer” but to create an array of possibilities and alternatives.

Tools: brainstorming, mental maps, drawing. There is no framework at this stage.

4. Create a prototype.

Because designers learn by doing, they create prototypes and see how they work. That is, a physical solution must be made.

One of the critical elements of this step is speed. The point is not to come up with something perfect but to test the idea quickly. The goal of this step is to get the picture before the creation process even begins. In this way, losses will be minimized if the prototype is unsuccessful.

5. Test

Once you have a prototype, take it and go out into the real world. It’s essential to get feedback because it’s likely that the prototypes will fail. But those failures should be treated as due and used to grow.

How to apply design thinking to life as a career example

Now let’s look at how this information can help us in life. The emphasis will be mainly on work. But these techniques can be used in any area.

Keep a diary of good times.

Suppose you feel that you are not fully committed to your work, not getting the most out of it. To determine how to improve the situation, start keeping a diary of good times. You should monitor yourself during the week to decide what activities you enjoy the most. Ask yourself the following questions:

When do you feel fully engaged in your actions? When are you most conscious?
What part of your job makes you happy?
When do you work at the peak of your abilities?
What activities make you feel calm and serene?
When do you feel like you are in a state of flux?
What do you do when you feel present?

Monitor your energy

Some actions increase your energy, while others deplete you. Write down your main steps for a month. As in the previous exercise, the goal of this is to notice how they affect you.

Create three Odyssey Plans.

In this exercise, you will think of several scenarios for your life five years in advance. These are trajectories you can trace. Take a look at the following:

One of the scenarios is your current life if it continues as it is now and doesn’t change.
The second scenario is what you would do if your current life suddenly stopped.
For more scenarios, think about what you could do with your life. Most people just don’t think about it. So create some techniques and see what happens. Maybe you’ve thought about selling your possessions and traveling the world. Or wanted to become a lawyer or a chef?

Include not only your career but also your personal goals. The point of this exercise is to realize that life can be different. You don’t have to live it the way you are living it now.

Identify the problem.

The previous three exercises have helped you gather information about your life and who you are. Now you need to use that information to identify the problem. Here are some ways to do that:

How can I change my day to do more of what I like and less of what I don’t like?
How can I do more positive things?
What do I need to do more of in my job to make me feel happy?
What skills do I need to learn to start moving in a new direction?
What should I do next?
How can I create the next version of myself?
What do I need to change the most?
How can I reinvent myself?

Challenge the imagination.

There is a difference between navigating and searching. Navigation is when you know your destination and then plan and follow a route to get there. The problem with your life is that you don’t know exactly where you are going. You may only have a general idea expressed by the phrases “I like these things” or “I don’t like these things.” Nothing specific.

Here’s an example of how hunters hunt in a wild forest:

There’s an antelope or a deer somewhere, but the hunters don’t know exactly where.
They do, however, know how to track the animal.
So they go from point to point, looking for clues that will direct them to the animal.
Each clue leads to the next.
They find the animal.

When you use brainstorming, you can think of lots of possibilities and alternatives. Then you choose the best ideas and start prototyping and testing them.

Prototype and test.

Prototyping is a quick and cheap experience that’s readily available. Instead of endlessly analyzing things in your mind or on paper, you go out and try to learn and understand something quickly.

For example, you want to become a lawyer. You can do the following:

Invite someone who is currently going to law school for coffee.
See if there is a chance to attend a lecture at law school.
Talk to a lawyer.
Go to court and observe the process.

You’ll get much closer to your goal by continuing to test and prototype than if you’re only trying things in your head. This study was conducted by wow essays. This company provides a large number of coupons and wow essays discount codes.