Can we design our life experience?

A few months back I made a trip to Big Sur and there was this old man sitting on the chair over a creek, having a beer, quietly enjoying his peaceful moment. We started to have a conversation while I took some photos of him. Briefly telling the story about his life, “life is about love” he said, “work is always there. treasure your love and enjoy the life.”

That was around the time I had a significant change in life. With the old man’s words of wisdom in mind, I started to really think about how to live a meaningful life to myself, to my family, my friends, people I love, and those who love me.

I don’t deny that I’m a workholic, sometimes. I love my job. I love designing for the experience. But when it comes to designing my own life experience, I was intimidated. There is no user research I can conduct, no contextual interviews I can poke around, no data I can back up my design. I read other people’s lives but those are not apple to apple comparisons.

My new roommate, a Brooks Visual Journalism student who was pursuing an acting/singing career since she was four, recently switched her life to be a student and producer at the back stage working behind the scenes. She shoots beautiful photographs and documentaries and in her own words, it’s “a new awareness”.

I admire those who has the guts to push for a life experience redesign. People hate changes. Every time Facebook launched something new, people hated it but after a while life goes on without you realizing it.

It’s a daunting task to design the life experience, or at least proactively, as one third of it is bed time, a quarter is to run around, commute, run errands, eat, and go to the bathroom, and after the deduction we only get less than half of the time to look for or define who we are, what we do, how to live our lives, meaningfully, and where we want to get at in the next 10 years. Often times we follow the mainstream, and sometimes disruption may not mean everything is bad.

Recently came across a video John Jay talking about creativity. The best part I like is that he advised to “put yourself in an unusual situation, put yourself with people you don’t hang out with, and put yourself out of the comfort zone. Our job is never let anyone define who we are in their terms.”

And to take a step back, before diving into self definition, collecting the experience might be an easier task. As Morris, Inc. puts it, “A designer must collect life experience from beyond the computer screen. They must observe culture, travel, watch movies, read books, and attend seminars and live life. This mindset creates well-rounded vision, adds solutions to your memory bank and builds connectedness between your ideas.” They also put together this short video on the wisdom they discovered in their explorations:

Writing to here, I don’t think I have a clear answer to my very first question: I wish I could:) But it helps to think aloud as I’ve been intrigued by it for quite a while. Maybe there is no better way but listening, observing, caring, learning, pushing, and always trying to pursue the true self, and follow my heart to wherever life brings me to.

Advertisement