Quote from Debbie Millman

Quote from Debbie Millman:

Every job is hard. Design is hard, marketing is hard, and working at McDonald’s and Starbucks and Walmart is hard. Why does it feel “easier” to do something we don’t love than to do something we actually feel passionate about? I think we lose our courage to pursue our creative dreams when we feel that the only way we can make a living is to conform. I realize now that making a living doing what you love requires a personal belief that you have something meaningful to contribute. What makes this particularly difficult is that making a living doing what you love doesn’t come with a real “rule book.” There is no single process for anything. In many ways, making a living doing what you love is an anti-process! For example, you may have a process for being creative, but the actual act of living creatively is organic and (nearly) involuntary: you have to do it—you have no choice—or a part of you dies. If you are considering settling because going after what you want seems too hard to do, remember that hating what you do every day is even harder. I guess this is a long way of stating that I believe one of the most important skills necessary to succeed as a creative leader is to, at all costs, avoid settling.

Design the Life you Love, a book by Ayse Birsel

12.4.15 / A LIFE DESIGNED
by Steven Heller

Ayse Birsel is co-founder and creative director of Birsel + Seck, a product design studio in New York City. She has developed a seminal book titled Design the Life You Love that teaches non-designers how to create a meaningful life using a unique creative process known as Deconstruction:Reconstruction™. “With this graceful, playful and human-centered perspective,” she says, “we design the products, organizations, work, services and experiences people love.” In this interview, she describes how design and drawing can change lives and loves.




What prompted you to do your book?
My father is a lawyer who’s always been interested in what I do, even though I didn’t follow the family tradition of law. He’s been telling me I need to write a book since my earliest days as a product designer. It was like a leitmotif of our conversations, but I couldn’t understand why this was so important to him, and moreover, what I’d write about.

Fast forward to Design the Life You Love. People who came to my workshops started to ask me if I had a book, or if I was writing one. They wanted something to take home with them and, as importantly, to share with others-their husbands, wives, kids, parents. Suddenly this idea of writing a book didn’t seem so crazy (sorry, dad!) or out of reach.

But writing was a whole different story. I wrote the first draft in Microsoft Word, which was a nonsensical idea for a designer. It was so boring that I haven’t read it since. For the second draft I tried to write with a friend who is a brilliant writer, so much so that I could only hear his voice. That’s when I realized I had to do it myself or not at all. The third time was the charm, and I owe a lot of that to Leah Caplan, one of my oldest collaborators, who showered me with inspiration and examples of similar illustrative books (including Keri Smith’s Wreck This Journal, which I loved for its style and playfulness) and helped me find my visual voice. That’s when I started to draw my book, and then I’d write about what I drew. Drawing rather than writing was the turning point. You’d think that would have been obvious, but it wasn’t. It took me three years to find my voice.

Tell me why life can be reduced to a design problem.
I think of my life as my biggest project. Life is just like a design problem, full of opposing needs and wants, constraints and challenges. You cannot have everything. If you want or need more, then you have to resolve some dichotomies, and design thinking is a great tool to help do this.

You know what is interesting though? Life deconstructed fits on two pages. Two! And that is a relief. Seeing your life on two pages gives you a sense of control-all that complexity, the enormity of life is actually manageable. It is not dissimilar to planning an incredible banquet and making a shopping list of what you're going to need. The idea of the banquet is overwhelming but once you have your list you know what to do. Life is not that different; it feels massive until you break it down to its ingredients and see that you can hold them on two pages. And those pages become your ingredients for what you want to make of your life, what you need more of, what you need to leave out, and what are your essentials.


Can non-designers design their life?
Ah! How much I love non-designers. Ordinary people are extraordinarily creative when given a design process and tools. Not only can they design their lives, they do it fearlessly (designing your life takes courage) and with gusto. Here it’s really important to frame life as a project within the context of design. Life is a complex problem and you need to think like a designer to get to something valuable: that means with optimism and empathy, holistically and playfully.

Over the years I’ve met some amazing people through my workshops. These people are often at a turning point in their lives and drawn to the idea of using design to reflect about what’s next. So they come to DLYL already with a personal challenge or problem set, which is a great place to start designing. No problem, no design. Their questions are universal: My kids left for college and I find myself an empty nester; my kids are little and my parents are aging, and I’m in the middle; I’m finishing college and I want to think about what’s next; I’m not happy at work; I’m retiring ... what does the next phase of my life look like? My role is to share my process and tools with them, inspire them with great examples of creative thinking from art, design, cooking, fashion and business. They do the rest and they do it beautifully.

There are a couple tricks I have devised to make the process super accessible:

• Lots of drawings. What could be so hard about a book that has a drawing on every page?
• Be playful and don't judge your ideas. The right one will emerge eventually and you will recognize it when you see it. So go with your gut, with whatever comes to your mind. The good, ugly, weird and funny!
• Draw and write to use both your right and left brain. Drawing and writing use different parts of the brain. You need both to design. That is why the book starts with a drawing exercise, same as all my workshops. Just draw something! I've learned over time that everyone can draw. You don't need to be Rembrandt, you just need to draw. Stick figures welcome.
• Gather inspiration. Every designer needs some inspiration to open up their minds to beauty and genius. The same goes for designing your life. In the book I ask you to think about other people who've influenced and/or inspired you. When it comes to life, look for inspiration in others. They inform you about your values, and you need your values to anchor your design. Let me leave it there but if you have the book, turn to the Heroes exercise and do it. Again, it is about serious play!

There are plenty of exercises in the book from people who have come to the workshops. They guide you alongside the process and show how you can design your life.

Will designing your life make you truly confident or falsely secure?
I think that on the spectrum between truly confident and falsely secure lies the designer's state of mind, energized and determined by the potential and power of your ideas.

There are three emotional states in design:

1. Bound by what you know. This marks the beginning of the creative process where your preconceptions are still holding you in current reality.
2. Freed by what you can imagine. This is the middle of the process, helped by inspiration, rich with possibilities and potential ideas. The process swells.
3. Energized by what is possible. This is towards the end when your logic kicks in and you start to make choices and converge towards the big idea.

When you have a good idea, you become excited by it and you see the possibilities. You know that inner, intuitive feeling you get when you know you're onto something. You're past the initial moment of inertia where you are bound by what you know and feel stuck. You're in that moment of convergence on the IDEA, the one that is just right, the one that rises to the top and says, pick me!, the one that gives you the courage to share your idea with others and bring people along to help you realize it.

That to me is the state of mind of designing your life. Confident enough to prototype it and secure enough to share it with others so that you can collaborate together, but also honest enough to know that, like any designer, you need to protect and nurture your idea until it’s strong enough to stand on its own. And even then you need to continue to evolve it over time.

[From The Daily Heller. Permalink.]

Quote from Martha Graham

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. . . . There is no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us dancing.”

—Martha Graham, to Agnes de Mille

29 Ways to Stay Creative (infographic)

Play!

Loved this TED talk.

Play is necessary for creativity, productivity, learning, and much more. People who play more are happier, healthier, have better relationships, and are more open to trying new things.

http://www.ted.com/talks/steve_keil_a_manifesto_for_play_for_bulgaria_and_beyond

3 Paths Toward a More Creative Life

From Fast Company's Co.Design:

1. Be mindful—disconnect
2. To create meaningful things, delve into the past
3. Be masterful

See all the details here:

http://www.fastcodesign.com/1671921/3-paths-toward-a-more-creative-life

Quote: Stefan Sagmeister

How do you go about ispiration/having ideas?

Stefan: The process I've been using most often has been described by Maltese philosopher Edward DeBono, who suggests starting to think about an idea for a particular project by taking a random object as point of departure. Say, I have to design a pen, and instead of looking at all other pens and thinking about how pens are used and who my target audience is etc., I start thinking about pens using.....(this is me now looking around the hotel room for a random object)....bed spreads. Ok, hotel bedspreads are...sticky....contain many bacteria...., ahh, would be possible to design a pen that is thermo sensitive, so it changes colors where I touch it, yes, that could actually be nice: An all black pen, that becomes yellow on the touching points of fingers/hands...., not so bad, considering it took me all of 30 seconds. Of course, the reason this works is because DeBono's method forces the brain to start out at new and different point, preventing it from falling into a familiar grove it has formed before.