The Design of Everyday Life

Everything is designed and I want to show you how you’re designing all day everyday in whatever field you work in. Let’s agree that we are all creating — i.e., designing — experiences. These experiences can be (1) Products: tangible physical hardware or software. Or (2) Services: intangible sets of rules that guide behavior.

Given the breakdown above, we can say in our professions, we are Makers of products or Thinkers of services. Of course, there is overlap here, it is not binary black and white. We tend to do both.

So, how am I a designer you ask? It’s a lot easier to relate to this question if you identify as more of a Maker. As a maker, you create artifacts, drawings, physical structures, you externalize your thoughts by transforming materials from our earth. What does that look like? You rub a piece of carbon on the surface of a tree to record your thoughts. In simpler words, you use a pencil to write down your ideas on paper. This applies as well if you work in construction, cooking, or engineering.

If you are more of a Thinker, you’re constantly designing as well. Design, simply put, is the intelligence behind creation. So if you are a financial advisor and you’re about to meet a prospective client, you’re probably designing your interaction with them — i.e., doing service design. Which topics to talk about in which order. Which information to give them at which time. The flow of the entire conversation is how you’re designing the service you’re providing. This applies as well if you work in sales, people management, providing health services, and pretty much any profession in which human behavior is involved. Depending on your specific job title, you might have some or very deep knowledge in strategy and operations, math, and communications.

If you’re thinking to yourself, I think I do both, then you are correct. Like I said, the two are not mutually exclusive. If you’re a Maker you need to be knowledgeable of how humans behave, in order to sell what you make, you need communication skills to get the deal done, and once you make a sale, you need to know some math to balance your books.

Now on the other hand if you’re more of a Thinker you’re probably thinking “I’m not the creative type”. What you probably mean is that “I don’t have the knowhow to make things look pretty”. Big difference. You are creative! Because the design of the power point presentation you made is about the content in it not the packaging. Like Steve Jobs once said “Design is what it does, not what it looks like”.

If you wanna learn more about how to apply design principles to everyday life, I invite you to read my blog called Everything is Designed talking about the design of different experiences.