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Design the Life You Love, Part 1: Deconstruction, Ayse Birsel, Product Designer and Author, Design the Life You Love, with Ayse Birsel, Product Designer and Author, Design Your Life
Our life is our biggest design project because it’s full of problems and constraints, and we can’t have everything. So applying design process to our life is about thinking about our life with creativity and optimism. When I grew up, there was kind of like a roadmap– a simple roadmap that if you went to school, perhaps if you did your masters, and then you got a good job, you got married, you had kids, you did your work. And that was the definition of a good life. And today, I think that things have changed so fast that we don’t have that roadmap anymore. And so I think that’s partly what really inspires people to think about, how can I make my own rules?
Take apart your life
A couple years ago, I came up with my design process. And I called it Deconstruction/Reconstruction. And Deconstruction/Reconstruction is really based on my expertise, which is product design. And it’s taking what I did intuitively inside my mind and making that tangible as something– a process and set of tools that I could share with people and walk them through.
Step one is deconstruction. And deconstruction is taking something apart so that we can see what it’s made up of. It’s almost like creating an ingredients list. And so when you deconstruct your life, you put your life at the center of your page. You write, “My Life”. And then you write down around that the building blocks. What are the building blocks of your life? So that could be family, work, places you’ve lived in, time, hobbies. You can put things that are positive, negative, things that are from your past, present, or future. It’s really from the gut. Whatever comes to your mind, you can put there. And then once you don’t know what else to put, that’s when you stop. And you can always go back and add to it. So it’s very forgiving.
And once you lay out the basic building blocks, then you start breaking those apart in writing down, you know, who is my family? Who are the members of that? Or, what are the pieces of my work? And so that’s the first deconstruction.
Remap the building blocks to the four quadrants
The next step is to see the big picture, which– there’s actually a really easy technique, and that is to think in four quadrants. What’s the emotion of your life, what’s the physical of your life, what’s the intellect of it, and what’s the spirit? If you can think in these four quadrants, you’re really thinking about your life big picture. And then you can start to see, ah, there are some things that repeat in different quadrants. Maybe some quadrants you have a lot of things to say, and some not so much. So you might have a lot in emotion, and then you might find, well, in intellect, I don’t know quite what to say.
And even that starts to give you a sense of like, how do I need to balance my life? What are some of the emerging patterns? And what I like about deconstruction is, because you’re breaking something apart, it also helps break your preconceptions of how things go together. You know how we sometimes assume this goes with that? It breaks that. And it allows us to think about, well, which pieces do I want to keep, what do I want to change, and what do I want to completely get rid of? Seeing that in front of you is really helpful.
Shift your point of view
What deconstruction is like– if I gave you a small black camera, let’s say a Pentax, and you took that apart, this little black massive thing– when you take it apart, you have like a hundred pieces inside– hundreds. You’ve deconstructed it. Now the question is, can you put it back together again? I bet that you can’t. And that really is the power of deconstruction. Once you take something apart, you can’t quite put it back the way it was before. And so deconstruction helps us to see our life differently, because now we don’t see it as this compact massive thing. We see it in its parts and pieces. And we realize, well, I can change some of these things. And I can bring it back together in a different way, which is really about shifting our point of view about something we know, and to start thinking about it differently.
What’s really interesting and what I’ve learned over the years is that your life fits– your life deconstructed fits on two pages, which is really liberating. And it gives you a sense of control. You would think that life would be much more complex. It’s this massive thing. But it really fits on two pages.