Designing the Life you Love with Ayse Birsel

<p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Finding an opening quote from my conversation with Ayse Birsel – One of Fast Company magazine’s ‘World’s Top 15 Designers’ and author of Design the Life You Love was a challenge, mostly because I delighted in re-listening to each moment of it.</span></p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In this opening quote, Ayse is talking about the joys of having a process that guides her in her design journey. </span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">Her wonderful book, Design the Life you Love is not self-help BS...it’s a visual thinking masterpiece and a guide to one of the most powerful and simply stated design processes I’ve ever seen….and I’ve seen and made a lot of them.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The double diamond of design thinking was my first design process, the first map to creativity that I followed, and it helped me design entire work engagements, hour-long meetings and multi-day workshops.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">But underneath that framework is a deeper one: Ayse’s De:Re map. De:Re stands for deconstruction and reconstruction, and this idea is essential if you’re going to design anything well.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">In the context of designing conversations, meetings and workshops, the key question is: What are the parts that you can see? If you can’t see the parts, you can’t shape them.</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">That’s why we love frameworks...they help us know what to look for!</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">The idea of deconstruction is controversial in some spaces. It made me think of one of my favorite quotes from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:</span></p> <p> </p> <p><span style="font-weight: 400;">When analytic thought, the knife, is applied to experience, something is always killed in the process. That is fairly well understood, at least in the arts... Something is always killed. But what is less no