Book Review: Designing Your Life: Build a Life that Works for You
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Designing Your Life is a book which seeks to apply product design practices to the problem of how to lead a good life. The idea is fairly simple and clever: prototype life changes with a goal of learning more about them, rather than dedicating time and effort towards making those life changes happen. The book is filled with anecdotes and a wide variety of devices intended to drive the point home, but that is the essence of the concept.
I really like the idea of this book, in no small part because it arose organically out of a set of practices that helped to solve really difficult problems in product design. I think many of the insights drawn out of product design are applicable in other areas of life, and it’s actually little wonder: at the end of the day, product design tries to answer questions about how people live their lives. It’s not all that surprising that the practices which answer questions like “how do people interact with an entirely new product they’ve never encountered before?” can help answer somewhat loftier questions like “how do people handle career challenges they’ve never encountered before?” To be sure the similarity between these two questions is far from obvious, and the insight to connect them is I think a large part of this book’s value. On top of that, the book offers practical, step-by-step suggestions for putting this sort of prototyping into practice.
I do think the book suffers from some degree of myopia, or perhaps that it makes promises which it doesn’t quite live up to. The title should really be “Designing your career”, since the book focuses so heavily on career change. There’s a little lip service here and there to changes in other areas of one’s life, but I’m not sure that the practices embraced here really do apply in other areas of life. You can’t readily prototype an entirely new family, in the same way that you might prototype a new career. The book is also a little bit too heavily invested in anecdotes and gimmicks; at first they are somewhat amusing and entertaining, but they quickly become tedious and a little pedantic as the book progresses.
On the whole, the concept of prototyping with an eye towards discovery and learning is an important one. The insight that this concept can be applied towards career changes is clever and compelling, and I think well worth exploring.