Design the Life You Love: A Step-By-Step Guide to Building a Meaningful Future

We have a unique book for you this week from award-winning product designer Ayse Birsel. Birsel has set her eyes on a new creative project: your life. Actually, that may sound a little presumptuous. Let me back up a bit.

Birsel considers her own life to be her biggest project, and found that applying the process she uses in her design work made dramatic improvements, that her "life started to design itself" in wonderful, productive new ways. Furthermore, she discovered many other people wanted to do the same thing, and began holding workshops in 2010 to help them. All of this culminates and comes together in Design the Life You Love.

This book is for anyone who, like me, thinks that your life is your most important project. It does not require that you have any design or creative experience, just the desire to explore your life from a new point of view and to learn to think like a designer.

So, why the design process? How does it help?

Design is about identifying and working withing given constraints to arrive at new and better solutions. Life, just like a design problem, is full of constraints: time, money, age, location, circumstances, etc. You cannot have everything. If you want more, you have to be creative about how to make what you need and what you want coexist. This requires design thinking.

So Ayse Birsel designed her book to be a workbook, or as she prefers a "playbook," because she wants you to play in it. And, though this is a book that requires a pen or pencil, it does not require you have any proclivity for drawing or creative experience. It simply requires you to decide that you want your life to be a creative experience. And, though it is lifelong work, it is a book the author suggests working on in short bursts—20 minutes at a time. That means you can fit it into your life easily, and let the things you're working on steep in the space between them.

Birsel calls her creative process "Deconstruction:Reconstruction," and the book helps the reader deconstruct the pieces of their life and list them to better see your life's overall makeup, and then put them back together again in a more deliberate, literally constructive manner.

The book is also a beautiful product in its own right, as you might expect from a product designer. There is a lot of white space to work in, but when the space is filled, it's filled with useful instruction, helpful tips, great drawings and wonderful quotes. Consider this spread:

A perfect quote for the postseason. And just like when a ballplayer is seeing the ball well, Design the Life You Love will help you slow the game of life down so you can see it more clearly and make more consistent, powerful contact with your goals.

We have 20 copies available.