Designing Your Year

It’s that time when many of us reflect on what we have accomplished and what we might like to change in our lives. Whether or not you set new year’s resolutions there are important parts of the design process that can help you design a better year for yourself. It won’t be a perfect year because designs are never perfect. There are always trade offs. Here are four parts of design that you can apply to making a better year for yourself:

Human Centered Design

Make the design of your year human centered. Try to stay away from designing your year to be absolutely perfect, a year where you read 100 books, exercise an hour everyday, meditate, learn 20 new skills, and create a masterpiece. That would all be great, but it isn’t very attainable. To make the design of your year human centered think about the context of your life. Things like your current behavior, resources, circumstances, and whether or not you are in the middle of a pandemic all need to be considered in the design of your year.

Iteration

Chris Mattson calls iteration the “key to design success.”1 I think one of the reasons we give up on new year’s resolutions is failing to iterate. Imagine if in product design we developed one prototype and when it failed we abandoned the entire project. It’s ridiculous to even think about. Yet when many of us approach the new year we develop a prototype of what we want to become and then on January 3rd when we miss one of our goals we give up and think maybe next year can be better. To better design your year, continue to iterate on what is and isn’t working. You may have to adjust some goals or change some practices but if you continue to work at it your design will certainly be better than if you simply give up.

Balancing Requirements

At the start of any design project we think about the end goal and what will define success for the design. This will often take the form of a set of requirements for the design, but sometimes those requirements conflict with each other. I used to work in the bike industry and for a road bike you would ideally have a bike that is lightweight, aerodynamic, comfortable, responsive, and as inexpensive to make as possible. The problem is that the most aerodynamic tube shapes for the frame are shapes that don’t necessarily lend themselves to being the most comfortable, or the lightest bike certainly won’t be inexpensive. In product design we have to think about a hierarchy of the relative importance of the requirements. As you design your year, think about what are the most important things you want to achieve. 

For instance, some common goals are to sleep better and exercise more, but often we try to wake up early to exercise. This takes away from our sleep. So figure out which is more important or find other ways to design your life to accommodate both.

Design Reviews

A design review is when the design is reviewed by a person or group external to the team. They can often be uncomfortable as you talk through what is going well and what the flaws are in your design. If you push through initial discomfort, the design review will ultimately lead to a better product. Learning to seek out and enjoy design reviews was something that took some time, but now I love design reviews (Read more about design reviews and how Pixar is fanatical about design reviews here). In the design of your year, periodically review what is going on with someone you trust. Whoever it is, talk with them and find times to perform a design review of your year. An outsider’s perspective will often give key insight that you missed because you are too close to the problem. 

As a final point and a lesson outside of the design process that I always tell design teams I mentor is to celebrate your victories. In teams we often think about penalties for bad performance, but forget to celebrate small victories. So decide now on how you can celebrate the small victories in the year you design. Think about what you want out of your year and follow the design process to make it a good one.

References

[1] C. Mattson, “Iteration: The most important concept in design,” The BYU Design Review, 2020, accessed 29 Dec 2020.