What is Life Design Work?

Snapshots of
'Life Design'

What does it mean to use "design thinking" to workshop your next steps in life?

Early Life Design Exploration

In the Design Thinking for Life course, the cohort’s been thinking a lot this week about visions and the process of visioning. What does it mean to think like a designer? What is the role of evidence in having conviction in a vision? What is the value of being ‘somewhat delusional’ (as student Qayla has coined it) about visions for the future?

In the words of student Francisco: “My mom always has the best sayings, she says ‘a vision, no matter how small, is always a good one”.

DeaQuan’s Vision Board for Success

DeaQuan says in his presentation: “Ideas keep your mind fresh, keep you colorful and open so you don’t stagnate and be… uncool.” And reminds us that “deep down if you have no heart you are going to be stuck. You need heart to understand what you value.”

One student, Arlo, said of the process of creating a guiding ‘Compass’, “[It] filled me in on some basic things that I never knew that I could be good at. I realize that I’m kinda good at critical thinking. And creative reasoning, and adapting with my environment. A lot of my friends surfaced for me that there is more to me than what I thought I was. I had no idea what I could be doing before this. This solidified what I already had in mind about doing creative work, but I [also] gained insights about potential jobs and paths I could take.”

Another student, Trendi, starts his Compass presentation by putting the song “The Climb” by Miley Cyrus on the loudspeaker. No one was surprised.

Leraun opens with a story about an important community he became a part of at a video game tournament, and what takeaways he has that can guide what he looks for in a work environment.

Qayla tells us about how she wants to be a role model for Black women in computer science, and that her Compass led her to a surprising new prospective pathway: “teaching old people how to use computers, so they don’t get scammed”.

Students differentiate between a mission, a passion, a vocation, and a profession. Interviews with friends and family act as mirrors to their own talents. Peers give peers prompts for storytelling that can lift up insights into their values and what matters most. From Jaylynd’s story about the joy of live streaming gospel music commentary from his bedroom, his peers notice that he values independence, creativity, working under his own autonomy, and leaving a legacy. When we pick jobs and careers and build other infrastructure in our lives, what would it look like to let these values guide the way?

Also overheard:

“I’m good at a lot of stuff, but I still don’t know what I’m going to do.”

“I want to do something that I love doing regardless of what I get paid.”

“I like to have a vision, I plan it, I go toward success.”

“When I talk to God it makes me feel better when I feel stuck.”

“Success means just that you work hard at anything you do.”

“Time investment is more important to me [to weigh in my future path] than financial investment. Because I want to put time into my relationships.”

Life Design work can’t happen in a vacuum. Students are each other's teachers and draw connections with and for each other. We look for patterns, push the vague into the specific. Jenny is set on an IT career but we notice something brewing between her own stated talents of ‘responsibility, friendliness, warmth, and connection’ with her stories about the contentment she felt working at a special-needs daycare. What students do with the noticings of the group is under their own power. It’s an exciting, but always daunting prospect to be witnessed by others. In these early weeks of Life Design work, our project is to be playful and expansive, and to set everything we can out on the table for consideration.

Community in the Life Design Classroom

Matt and Simon said that they knew when starting Workshop U that relationships would mean everything. During orientation, students talked to each other about what it was like in high school to go to class “every day to a place that makes you feel less than, not worthy” and what it would mean to create a radically different culture here. What would it look and feel like to unconditionally value each person in the room? Matt told the room:

“Even in the adult professional world we don't think about attention as a gift; we think about it as an investment. We wonder what percentage of this thing is worth my time. We are constantly calculating. Let’s flip it around here. If one of the most important things about being human is that we are able to give, what does it mean to recognize our attention as a gift in this space? Both because you have something to offer, and because your classmates are worthy of giving to?”

If there has been one constant in the Workshop U classroom that hasn’t changed: it’s that students are rooting for each other.

After seeing Arlo present his Compass design, Khabir says “I think you have an abundance of paths that you can take, that you can get paid for too.” After Khabir’s presentation someone else chimes in from the back of the room, “You have a vision for yourself and what you want to do and that is beautiful.” They celebrate each other tremendously when someone comes into class late from an interview, even if they think they bombed. Ola shares a new beat he dropped during the class break. Cyan, an aspiring nail tech entrepreneur, shows off the nails she just did on Qayla’s hands. Students meet each other where they are at with genuine joy, affirmation, and specific compliments on their instincts and abilities.

The topic of loneliness comes up a lot. I hear again and again that the reason students show up is so that they don’t have “do it all alone”, “to not go at it on my own”, “to finally have someone to do this with”. ‘It’ and ‘this’ being the difficult project of wading through uncertainty.

The Life Design Interview Process

In the Design Thinking for Life course, students produce something called 'deliverables' – projects that relate directly to their life and move the needle on their path forward.

One student, Deona, explains the stakes of the work she’s produced:

“In our design class, all the deliverables we do are about ourselves. All the questions we answer have to do with us. Back in high school, we were always talking about an old man in 1936, like… what?”

Let’s do a deep dive into the process of one these projects...

Qayla reflects on a story of growth over her LDI’s

Deliverable #5: Life Design Interviews

Last month you received an email from us asking for your help in connecting students for Life Design Interviews with folks in the fields that they are considering.

As a reminder, Life Design Interviews (LDIs) are spaces for students to ask questions about the texture of different day-to-day work, and hear how others created their pathways into satisfying work life. As a bonus byproduct, students leave with a curated crew of field-specific mentors that can help advise their decisions and possibly open future doors.

One student, Leraun, sums it up by saying, “The name of the game is connections, building networks, and having insights about where we want to go.”

Making Introductions…

Workshop U connected students to a graphic designer, an EMT, a local fitness and beauty entrepreneur, a head of cybersecurity, and an artist who makes their living selling paintings of owls on Etsy. A freelance video editor, eight different graphic designers, a brand consultant, a music engineer, and the owner of a community art gallery. (+ 97 others).

Some of these introductions were to...

A welder-turned CEO of a fabrication company (the student interviewer proclaimed: ‘the work they do is SICK!’)

A civil engineer who advised a student that his biggest takeaway from years of managing teams is that ‘you can’t teach personality!’

A man who has worked for 50 years as a commercial ceramic tile layer and says of his path that he ‘wouldn’t have done a thing differently, not one’.

Students also learned to make their own introductions. One student completed 23 interviews (yes, we did make it a competition… can you blame us?) by going up to just about everyone he met on the street. Of his experience, his main takeaway was that “almost everyone I talked to would have liked to start their path down their job sooner than they did.”

How To Shape A Life

Life Design is not career planning. It is the bigger and more expansive project of building a secure, purposeful, connective, satisfying life at large.

So while this project produced a lot of job-specific learnings… more important to students was hearing a diversity of mindsets that people use to shape their lives over time. Our interviewees were storytellers, and stories stick.

Some student takeaways were…

“People who take risks get lucky.”
“Plans are useless, but planning is invaluable.”
“Relationships are key.”
“To stand out, you have to let people know what you can do”
“Every journey has its pros and cons, but it boils down to one thing: how bad do you want it?”
“A profession doesn’t mean much at the end of the day if you don’t feel fulfilled in your contributions to humanity.”

Shifting Trajectories//Staying the Course

Everyone has ideas about what they want to do with their lives, but it's not often these ideas are backed up with evidence. LDIs help students take the Possibility Maps they have created (three distinct versions of their next year’s steps) and test them against real-world stories, people, and their own experiences, to build out a fuller and richer picture.

Take two students who were highly interested in starting their own businesses. For one, LDIs confirmed the path: “If there’s one thing I know for sure it’s that I want to be an entrepreneur.” For the other, LDIs complicated it. After five interviews with self-starters with vastly different paths, they say: “I learned that entrepreneurship is overhyped and immensely daunting to embark on. [My LDIs] opened up a question to ask myself… am I ready to start my own business or do I want to join one?”

One hyper-technology-focused student felt LDIs helped her break free from what has felt like a mentally inevitable track for her future. Workshop U co-founder Matt told her that “talent is a double-edged sword. People see that you’re good at something and they reinforce it. [What you’ve done through the LDI process] is not just open minded and creative, but it's robust. You’ve shown yourself evidence of a whole landscape of possibilities.”

The Nuts and Bolts of Opportunity-Seeking:

Much of the LDI process was also a practical crash course in adult communications: setting up calendar invitations, writing follow-up thank-you-emails, and other unglamorous but necessary skills of networking.

One student, Alecia, says “I learned how to search for the people I needed to talk to… and what happens when they don’t get back to you”. Students felt floored by the idea that “if you follow up and keep those connections open, then we have those connections for life”. And importantly, came to see themselves AS connectors, not just reliant on others. “If anyone else needs this [in the future], we can say oh, I know someone in that field, and I could probably contact them for you if you’d like.”

Staff have many ideas about what the purpose of the LDIs are. We want students to meet people that they could see themselves becoming. We want students to practice building a community of mentors, and learn that most jobs come from people you know. We want students to start asking hard questions about what meaningful work means to them.

What did one student, Khalil, think the purpose was? He says it best in his Deliverable reflection.

“There are things people with experience can tell you about their jobs that you can’t learn anywhere else. Learning how work and life mixes together, and learning how to make them work as one and enjoy both sides is wonderful. The advice they give will last me forever. I want to ask more questions from those who came before me and went through hardships I might have that they can give me information about. Establishing these relationships will give me the answers I need.”

Snapshots of 'Life Design'

The Life Design Interview Process

Snapshots of
'Life Design'