1.
Applying Design Thinking
principles to career and life
Sathish Seshadri
17 March, 2017
Designing Your Life

2.
What we intend to cover…
• Why should we design our lives?
• What’s Design Thinking
• Why Design Thinking for life?

3.
It ain't what you don't know
that gets you into trouble.
It's what you know for sure
that just ain't so.
- Mark Twain

4.
What do I want to be when I grow up?

5.
Only 20% of the population can identify a singular passion
(Bill Damon, Path to Purpose)

6.
What you study determines your future?
What’s your goal?
Where do you see yourself 5 years from now?
Life is not an equation to be solved.

7.
So, lets build our way
forward by designing our
lives!
Life is a creative adventure
to be engaged.

8.
“If I had asked people what they wanted,
they would have said faster horses.”
― Henry Ford

9.
Problem Solving
• Ways of problem solving
• Engineering thinking
• Business thinking
• Design thinking
• Solving Wicked problems
• Success criteria is ambiguous and change in time.
• Once you have solved it you cant reuse
• Human problems
• Build our way forward

10.
Design Thinking
Human Centric
Ambiguous
Tangible
Iterative
Re-design

11.
Designing your life
• Solve for Future that hasn’t occurred yet
• Somehow figure out the way forward
• Only way is to build your way forward and not analyze your way
forward
• Define – problem find before we problem solve
• Do one step at a time to become a better version of you.

12.
Designer Mindset
• Curiosity
• Reframing
• Mindfulness to the process – don’t get ahead of the moment
• Radically collaborate
• Bias towards action
• False best is the enemy of the available better
• There is more aliveness in us than what we could achieve in one
lifetime

13.
The unexamined life is not
worth living!
- Socrates

14.
Acknowledgement - Ideas from the book: