I dove into the book project, doing research, interviews, a bit of writing, and some marketing. I expected to be—and was—busy. What I didn’t expect is that I would have an epiphany. Along the way, I suddenly gained a new way of looking at life—through the eyes of designers.
No, I didn’t buy funky eyewear or start watching Project Runway. Rather, I learned that the really important thing that designers do is solve problems. They start by questioning everything. They’re good at working around constraints. They love making fresh connections between disparate things. They are open to what can be rather than what is. And they do all these things by way of a plan. In fact, design has been described as the art of planning. I get off on planning, so I began to wonder: Could I adopt this design thinking in my own life?
I’d already applied one of the concepts, the one about questioning everything. A designer will start by asking what they affectionately call “stupid questions” about how things work (or look, or cost). How can I hold my Starbucks cup without burning my fingers? Why does shoveling snow hurt my back? Can a computer cost under $100? Does a car have to run on gasoline? This kind of questioning is the first step to making the fundamental changes that lead to progress. My progress had begun when I’d stepped back and asked myself “Why do I go to work every day?” and “What makes me happy?”
Designers are also really good at moving sideways. Not like crabs; like someone determined to jump fences and cross fields. They make it a point to pick up new areas of knowledge and they do it continuously. Then they create “smart recombinations” with all of these bits of knowledge and voilà: innovation. I’ve always somewhat disparagingly called myself a “generalist”—I get deeply interested in a topic for a while, and then move on to another one. This apparently makes me a T-shaped person, a very designer-like thing to be. Over time, as designers continually go wide and deep, their base of knowledge becomes like a reinforced platform of T’s linked together: TTTTTTTTTTT. (I was thinking of making a T-shirt with that as the logo, but a bunch of T’s stretching across the chest might unfortunately have a double meaning for a woman.)
The T-shirt idea isn’t the only creative impulse I’ve discovered since working on this topic. The funny thing is that by the end of the project I had become a designer myself. I designed some of the line art for the book, created promotional slideshows and videos that I posted on YouTube, made fun business cards, and most impressively (to my husband) taught myself enough web design to create a community magablog for the book.
This is a new and exhilarating direction for me. Whether I’ll continue to literally design things in the future, I’m not sure (my T-shaped history suggests I’ll move along at some point). But I know now that I’m going to continue to design my life. My “golden years” will be upon me sooner than I like and I want to make sure they’re the best they can be. How do I do that? I’m still trying to figure that out, but I know one thing—whatever happens, I want to make sure it happens by design.
Laura E. Kelly’s cards now say “Editorial Project Director” rather than “VP, Editor-in-Chief.” Check out the magablog she created for the new book GLIMMER: How Design Can Transform Your Life, and Maybe Even the World.