Dave Evans

Problems where you don't know what you're looking for until you find it, and when you find it, it's so unique to the context and the persons involved, it's not replicatable, and it changes over time.

And so design thinking is an approach to, number one, understanding the problem you're working on and what you might try to do about it.

And then having ideas that turn into prototypes, experiments to learn your way forward and see what might actually work.

And then you can implement something that actually is feasible.

So what Bill and I did starting 20 years ago is we took those ideas about designing a future thing you've never done before into designing ourselves, not just designing products.

And that's turned out to be a pretty interesting conversation.

Yeah, we say problem finding precedes problem solving.

And one of the reasons many efforts fail is you're working on the wrong thing.

Very often you're working on too big a thing or the wrong thing.

And so trying to answer that one ultimate existential question, what is the meaning of my life?

What will I be able to say on my deathbed and be satisfied with?

That is a really tall bar.

And frankly, we don't know how to design for that because it takes the whole life to answer it.

So we like working on answerable, doable problems.

And the better question is not what's the meaning of life, but how might I live a more meaningful life now?

And that's what we're trying to help people do.

What does it mean to have the mind of a designer?

Designers who think this way look at the world a little bit differently.

So fully engaged and calmly detached is this aspirational mindset that says, I want to be entirely available, entirely engaged with what I'm doing that's right in front.

I'm having a conversation with this incredibly lovely person named Shanka Vedantam on this fabulous conversation called Hidden Brain with a bunch of thoughtful people.