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It all started with a lunch.
Actually, it all started when we were both undergrads at Stanford University in the 1970s (Dave a little earlier in the decade than Bill). Bill discovered the product-design major and an exciting career trajectory to go with it. As a child, he used to draw cars and airplanes while sitting under his grandmother’s sewing machine, and when he majored in product design, it was because he had discovered (much to his surprise) that there were people in the world who did this kind of thing every day, and they were called designers. As the executive director of the Design Program at Stanford, Bill is still drawing and building things (he’s come out from under the sewing machine), directing the undergraduate and graduate programs in design, and teaching at the d.school (The Hasso Plattner Institute of Design—a multidisciplinary hub of innovation at Stanford where all the classes are based on the design thinking process). Bill has also worked in start-ups and Fortune 100 companies, including seven years at Apple, designing award-winning laptops (and those hinges) and a number of years in the toy industry, designing Star Wars action figures.
Bill knows how lucky he was to have discovered product design and a joyful and fulfilling career path so early. In our teaching careers, we’ve both come to see how rare that is, and just how often it doesn’t work that way for students, even at Stanford.
Unlike Bill, when Dave was an undergrad, he had no idea what he was going to do. He failed at being a biology major (more on that later) and graduated in mechanical engineering—frankly, for lack of a better idea. During college, he never found good help with the question “How do I figure out what I want to do with my life?” He managed to figure it out eventually, “the hard way,” and has enjoyed more than thirty years in executive leadership and management consulting in high technology. He product-managed the first mouse and early laser-printing projects at Apple, was a co-founder of Electronic Arts, and has helped lots of young start-up founders find their way. After a pretty rough start, his career developed wonderfully—but he always knew that it had been a lot harder than it needed to be.
Even though we both went off to start careers and families, we continued to keep a hand in working with students. Bill was at Stanford, where he watched as hundreds of students came through his office hours and struggled with figuring out life after graduation. Dave was teaching at UC Berkeley, where he had developed a course called How to Find Your Vocation (aka: Is Your Calling Calling?), which he taught fourteen times over eight years. Still, he longed to do more at Stanford. Along the way, he and Bill had intersected time and again, in business and personally. Dave had heard that Bill had just accepted the position of executive director of the Stanford Program in Design, a program Dave knew well. It occurred to Dave that the multidisciplinary demands of being a designer were likely to put design students under an unusually heavy burden: trying to find a way to conceive a personally meaningful and authentic, as well as commercially viable, career vision. He decided to call up Bill and have lunch and share some of his ideas—just to see what might happen. If it went well, maybe they’d have more lunches on the topic, and in perhaps a year or so something might come of it.
And that’s why it all began at lunch.
Five minutes into that lunch, it was a done deal. We decided we were going to partner to bring a new course to Stanford, to apply design thinking to designing life after college—first to design students and, if that went well, then to all students.
That course has gone on to become one of the most popular elective classes at Stanford.
When asked what we do at Stanford, we will sometimes respond with our carefully crafted elevator reply: “We teach courses at Stanford that help any student to apply the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life at and after university.” And, of course, they then say, “Great! What’s that mean?”
And we usually say, “We teach how to use design to figure out what you want to be when you grow up.” At that point almost everyone says, “ Oh! Can I take the class?!” For years we’ve had to say no to that question, at least to everyone who didn’t happen to be one of the sixteen thousand students at Stanford. That is finally no longer the case. We’ve been offering Designing Your Life workshops to everyone ( www.designingyour.life ), and we’ve written this book so that you don’t have to go to Stanford to have a well-designed life.
But you do have to be willing to ask yourself some questions. Some hard questions.