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

An interactive journal that serves as a joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you've always dreamed of, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer.

Life, just like a design problem, is full of constraints -- time, money, age, location, and circumstances. You can’t have everything, so you have to be creative to make what you want and what you need co-exist. Design the Life You Love is a joyful, inspirational guide to building the life you’ve always wanted, using the principles and creative process of an award-winning product designer. Through four steps that reveal hidden skills and wisdom, anyone can design a life they love!

AYSE BIRSEL has been designing award-winning products for over twenty years. She is the co-founder of Birsel + Seck, an innovative design studio in New York that partners with leading brands and Fortune 500 companies. She teaches at SVA and has taught at the Pratt Institute. Her work is in the permanent collections of the MOMA and Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum. She has received numerous design awards, including the IDEA Gold Award, ID Magazine Excellence Award, and Athena Award for Excellence in Furniture Design from RISD.

9 Dear Reader
10 About Design the Life You Love
16 What Is This Book?
18 How To Use This Book
20 Why Design?
22 Thinking Like a Designer
24 My Process
26 From Product Design
36 Ok, Time to Get Started
38 What Will We Do Together? 
        
00. Warm Up
42 Let’s Warm Up
54 Designing Life Using DE:RE Is Like Making Soup

01. Deconstruction
68 Let’s Deconstruct
80 DE: Four Quadrants

02. Point of View
102 Heroes as Inspiration
116 Metaphors 
138 Before You Reconstruct, Let’s Take Stock . . .

03. Reconstruction
152 Let’s Reconstruct
158 RE: Four Quadrants

04. Expression
172 Vision Map as Expression
178 Vision Letter as Expression
184 To-Do List as Expression
188 Manifesto as Expression
194 Poem as Expression

living the life
202 Let’s Retrace Our Steps . . .
204 Living the Life! 
210 Design the Life You Love
212 The Purpose

the end is only the beginning!
218 Templates
250 Reading List
252 About the Author
254 Thank You!