Prototype your life

In the 1990s a design firm in California called IDEO, and later a program at Stanford called the d.school, turned the way industrial designers work into a method anyone could use. Design thinking. Five moves: empathize, define, ideate, prototype, test. Understand the person you're designing for. Name the real problem. Generate many ideas without judging. Build a rough version fast. Try it, learn, repeat.

It was built for products. It works on lives. Two Stanford professors wrote a whole book applying it to careers, and the practice has spread because of one idea that most of us never apply to ourselves: prototype. Don't decide. Try a cheap, fast, small version, see what happens, and decide after.

Here's why it belongs in the month of Meaning. Most people approach the big questions, what work is mine, where should I live, who am I becoming, as decisions to be made correctly, once, with enough thought. Design thinking says: you can't think your way to those answers. You have to try small things and notice what they teach. Want to know if you'd love teaching? Teach one class. Want to know if the move is right? Spend a week there. The prototype gives you data no amount of deliberation can.

And the first move matters as much as the fourth. Empathize. Before you design anything, understand the person it's for, and in the design of a life, that person is you. One hundred and four days of a log is the deepest empathy research you've ever done on your own user.

Vault Human points to the d.school's free resources and the book, and we use the method in coaching every week.