As the Program Manager at the Taylor Center, I teach in the Social Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship Minor and lead human-centered design crash courses. Inspired by Stanford University’s Design Your Life course, I created a program for students to apply human centered design to developing their own life course.  A news items I wrote about the program is below

UPDATE: View the 2016 Impact Report Here

“Everything that makes our daily living easier, more productive, more enjoyable, and more pleasurable was created because of a problem, and because some designer or team of designers somewhere out there in the world sought to solve that problem…Designers imagine things that don’t yet exist, and then they build them, and the world changes. You can do this in your own life. You can imagine a career and a life that don’t exist; you can build that future around you, and as a result, your life will change” (Burnett & Evans, 2016).

At Taylor, we tackle “wicked” problems that are complex and challenging, ranging from climate change to poverty, systemic racism, and educational inequity. Yet every single one of us are also tackling the “wicked” problem of figuring out how to live, work, play, and love in the best, most efficient and life-giving way possible.

This Fall, Taylor is launching a five-week career development program for a group of students to TAYLOR their life course, inspired by the “Design Your Life” class and recent book released by Stanford Professors Bill Burnett and Dave Evans that teaches students to apply design thinking principles to their own life.

Participants in the program at Taylor will ideate multiple life paths, clarify their interests, focus and target their search, prototype and test elements of careers that interest them, learn how to market and brand themselves to stand out from the crowd, and map their community to effectively network with other changemakers around the world.

27% of college graduates end up in a job that is different from their major and nearly two thirds of workers in the US are unhappy in their work. With these unnerving statistics looming in our national consciousness, it is crucial for students to explore and break in to socially conscious career pathways that both inspire them and do good for the world.

Our life is a continuously unfolding experience, not a final destination that you map out, plan, execute and then “achieve” at a certain age. As such, instead of asking our students “what do you want to be when you grow up?,” we can ask them “who or what do you want to grow into?”, thereby opening up a wide array of multiple great life pathways and intelligently choosing how to move forward. This reframing is done in the same way a human-centered designer would reframe a problem for a client, thereby unlocking a vast array of potential solutions.

Remarkably, 80% of people do not have one “thing” that they are passionate about and researchers have found that passion often develops after an experience and testing something out, not before.

At Taylor, we have a bias to action. We test things out. We prototype. We find out what works and what isn’t working. We learn from our failures, as failures are the raw material of success that help us understand what is not working and how we can move forward in a different way. Instead of sending out hundreds of resumes to jobs that students don’t even really understand, participants will learn how to build prototypes to explore questions about different life alternatives, testing the waters and gathering crucial data, in the real world, to better design their life.

In the age of the internet, students have a vastly interconnected world at their fingertips, but many do not know how to effectively connect and network, believing that they need to figure out their life completely on their own. Yet, a well-designed and lived life, is one that is co-created in collaboration with other and participants in the program will learn how to engage others in their life-design and build a team of contributors, supporters, mentors, and champions.

By remaining curious, ideating multiple possibilities, and prototyping and testing different pathways while remaining centered on human relationships and communities, participants will engage in a series of interactive, dynamic activities and learn how to design a life that makes a positive difference in the world and is “TAYLORed” to unique life and personality.