May 24th, 2008
Welcome to the next installment of my ‘Life design’ blog. To move forward in achieving my goal of seeding ideas and debate that will allow us to explore what it means to live well and do life design, I’d like to outlay a framework for thinking about life design.
Design thinking refers to a certain way of coming up with solutions to problems. Read about it at wikipedia and watch this video:
One of the keys to good design is understanding the problem deeply, trying to view it from different perspectives and angles. Rather than deducing the ‘right’ answer, possible solutions are explored; design is often referred to as a ‘game’ and designers play with ideas. They come up with multiple solutions and see what works. It is in this spirit that I approach this blog – and invite you to as well.
In loosely following the 7 steps of design thinking (define, research, ideate, prototype, choose, implement and learn), I’d like to suggest a design problem and then explore ways of solving it – the more left-field the better! This is where the fun starts – how do you prototype life design ideas? Live them! See what works and what doesn’t, feed it back to us and adjust accordingly. As a community we can develop new and exciting ways of integrating spirituality into our everyday lives that make a huge and tangible difference to the quality of our lives and relationships.
There are no ‘right’ solutions so lets generate as many ideas and examples of implementation as possible – but the way that you choose to design something into your lifestyle may look very different to mine. As designers we each have our unique styles.
In my next entry I’d like to start with something fundamental to 21st century life – time. No one seems to have enough. People are working longer and longer hours. Terms like ‘time-starved’ are being coined to describe the busy and rushed people around us – how should a 21st century pilgrim think about time? What does a deep, meaningful use of time look like? Stay tuned…