The Conversation Factory Designing the Life you Love with Ayse Birsel
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.
In this opening quote, Ayse is talking about the joys of having a process that guides her in her design journey.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That's why we love frameworks...they help us know what to look for!
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:
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 noticed in the arts—something is always created too.
-Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the art of Motorcycle Maintenance
What is created through deconstruction is the opportunity to reconstruct something new.
Ayse asks us to apply this framework, methodically, to our lives, so that we can build our biggest design project, our lives, according to principles we can (literally) live with.
What's truly delightful about Ayse's perspective is that many people still assume that design is for the few - designers. And that designers are akin to artists, disheveled and mysterious and creative. And that creativity is more magic than method. Watch Ayse's TEDx talk, read her book, and you'll see...design is for everyone.
The question is...when you look at a problem, what do you see? A messy mass? Or do you start to deconstruct the challenge into its parts?
This is true of a workshop or meeting or a conversation...what are the parts? Who are the players? What are the goals and constraints? Once you start deconstructing...you can start reconstructing a new configuration and a process to get there.
I could go on, but I don't want to keep you from enjoying this conversation any longer!
Links and Resources
Design the life you love: The book
About Ayshe
Ayse (pronounced Eye-Shay) Birsel is one of Fast Company's Most Creative People 2017. She is the author of Design the Life You Love, A Step-By-Step Guide to Building A Meaningful Future. On the Thinkers50 shortlist for talent, she gives lectures on Design the Organization You Love to corporations. Ayse writes a weekly post on innovation for Inc.com.
Ayse designs award-winning products and systems with Fortune 100 and 500 companies, including Amazon, Colgate-Palmolive, Herman Miller, GE, IKEA, The Scan Foundation, Staples and Toyota.
She is the recipient of numerous awards including Interior Design Best of Year Award in 2018 for Overlay, a new Herman Miller system, multiple IDEA (Industrial Design Excellence Awards) and Best of NeoCon Gold Awards, Young Designers Award from the Brooklyn Museum of Art and the Athena Award for Excellence in Furniture Design from Rhode Island School of Design. Ayse is one of only 100 people worldwide to be named as one of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches—a program Goldsmith conceived during Ayse's Design the Life You Love program—along with the President of the World Bank, the head of the Rockefeller Foundation and the President of Singularity University. She is a TEDx speaker. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the MoMA, Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Born in Izmir, Turkey, Ayse came to the US on a Fulbright Scholarship and got her masters degree at Pratt Institute, New York.