Using Life Design To Help Students Make Career Decisions

Popularized by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans from Stanford University, Life Design is the process of applying design thinking techniques to the process of figuring out what you want to do with your life. Design thinking has many intricate moving pieces that can be applied to designing one’s dream life, but a very simplified version of it can be summarized as, “get curious, talk to people, try stuff’. At Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the Career and Professional Development Center (CPDC) has been taking steps over the past year to start integrating this process into our curriculum and our office’s programs and services.

One of the most prominent ways that Life Design has been introduced across campus is through a customizable workshop series that was developed by CPDC Graduate Team Member, Marylou Neidig. This workshop series consists of three separate hour-long presentations that go into greater detail with the design thinking process and outline specific Life Design activities. These workshops are designed to be customizable, so that they can be adjusted to fit a specific group or classroom’s needs. There is the capability to do both longer or shorter presentations and we have also developed a selection of specific career activities that they can include. Much of the content in these workshops has been inspired by Burnett and Evan’s widely popular book Designing Your Life; however more recently, IUP CPDC’s Director and Associate Director, Dr. Tammy Manko and Kelsey Thompson, participated in the Life Design Studio Training that was offered through Stanford University. Moving forward, our hope is to integrate some of the material learned during that training, into what we offer at IUP as well.

Outside of the classroom at IUP, Life Design has also been introduced into the CPDC’s basic student appointment protocol. There are new conversation topics, open-ended questions, and activities that our career coaching staff can utilize during student appointments to facilitate career exploration and life planning. Looking towards the future, the CPDC aims to continue to offer the workshop series across campus and further develop life design concepts to be able to assist students in creating an authentic life for themselves.

If you’re looking to get started with life design on your campus, we would highly recommend checking out the book Designing Your Life or watching Burnett and Evans’s TedX Talks on YouTube.

Marylou Neidig

Graduate Assistant

Indiana University of Pennsylvania