Ayse Birsel on How to Apply Design Thinking to a Longer Life

[B]OLD AGE With Debbie Weil

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Ayse Birsel on How to Apply Design Thinking to a Longer Life

Debbie Weil

Dec 02, 2022

Today Debbie talks with Ayse Birsel. She’s an award-winning industrial designer whose firm has designed hundreds of products for brand name companies like Herman Miller, Ikea and Target. And that includes a product you may have sat on: a toilet seat.

She’s taken her industrial design methodology, broken it down, simplified it, made it fun and inviting… and turned it into a process for life design. The result is her second and newest book: Design the Long Life You Love: A Step-by-Step Guide to Love, Purpose, Well-Being, and Friendship.

One of her key points is that life, just like a design problem, is full of constraints -- time, money, age, location, and circumstances. And if you're an older adult reimagining your last chapter, you know what your final "constraint" is. You can’t have everything, so you have to be creative. You have to think like a designer.

You have to get ideas and beliefs out of your head and down onto paper and cultivate an attitude of playfulness and optimism - if you want to change. So the book is filled with Ayse’s whimsical drawings, and her step-by-step maps: for how to make new friends, how to reimagine work, how to create meaning, how to separate achievement from success, how to check your well-being index, and more.

One of Debbie's favorite exercises: how to reconcile yourself to unresolved issues. Make a list, Ayse says, pick three, personify them and write them a letter and then let them go.

Ayse calls her method deconstruction / reconstruction. That means deconstruct your life, do a lot of exploring through scribbling and list-making and drawing, and then reconstruct the life you want.

Her new book is jammed with exercises and lists and interviews with her favorite mentors. Ayse says you have to draw (even if you think you can’t) every day to rev up your creative brain. Debbie's advance copy is littered with yellow sticky notes as well as scribbles and arrows. She can't draw but is trying anyway.

Mentioned in this episode or useful:

Design the Long Life You Love: A Step-by-Step Guide to Love, Purpose, Well-Being, and Friendship by Ayse Birsel (Running Press Adult, Dec. 6, 2022)
Ayse’s Website
aysebirsel.com/newsletter
Designer couple: Ayse Birsel and Bibi Seck
3 Strategies to Disrupt Yourself for Greater Success in Changing Times by Ayse Birsel (Fast Company, 9/22/22)
Results of her study: CO-DESIGNING WITH OLDER PEOPLE (SCAN Foundation Full Report)
Ayse’s TEDxCannes talk, If your life is your biggest project, why not design it? (800K+ views)
Design the Life You Love: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Meaningful Future by Ayse Birsel (Ten Speed Press, 2015)
Shirley F. Moulton
A book with a similar title by two Stanford professors: Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans (Knopf, 2016)

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