4 Design Principles We Should All Live By
How to use design to create the life you want to live
Design is about creating solutions to real-life problems. It’s about developing better experiences for people, whether it’s the chair you sit on or how easy it is to navigate your city’s subway system.
Therefore, it makes sense to use design thinking to solve the problems in our lives and maximize the experiences we have.
And what better person to create better experiences for than yourself, amiright? 😉 (Just kidding. Don’t be selfish, helping other people is great)
Here are a few life philosophies I’ve learnt from being a designer…
1. More isn’t Better.
In a time where everyone is looking to have more, see more, do more, it’s easy to lose focus of what purpose we’re trying to fulfill with all of these things.
The minimalist design philosophy — as described by Antoine de Saint-Exupery — is:
Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
When designing, more colours, more shapes, or more buttons doesn’t make for a better design. In fact, it can be even worse.
It means there is nothing specific on your screen or poster or flag that is more important than another. There is no focus, no priority, and is frankly overwhelming. It leaves the user deleting your app or closing your website.
The same applies for our lives.
If we pack every minute of our days with supposedly “productive” functions, then we end up avoiding everything anyways, because it’s just that goddamn overwhelming. While these might all be activities we consider priorities in our lives, we can’t complete them all to our full potential.
In their book Scarcity, behavioral economist Sendhil Mullainathan and psychologist Eldar Shafir actually found that intense feelings of time scarcity has been shown to lower creativity, and increase impulsiveness.
This makes sense.
After all, I don’t think many of us would work better with someone breathing down our neck, nor would we enjoy treating our lives like a endless sprint.
There’s a reason why some of our best ideas and thoughts appear while we’re showering, when we’re about to sleep, or even going on a walk. It’s when we’re relaxed and our mind is free to wander that we’re at our best; not when we’re attempting to decipher pages of content or biting our nails from stress.
Here are some activities inspired by Jocelyn K. Glei’s own article about white space.
- Sit and wonder
- Take a walk
- Ask yourself random questions (and come up with random answers)
- Draw anything (even if it’s bad)
- Observe people
- Stream of consciousness writing (write absolutely anything that comes to mind)
So in short, take a breather.
Think about what values you’re looking to uphold in your life, what purpose you want to lead your life with, and prioritize. Let your brain draw random connections between things you never thought of before, because that’s how true insight, true creativity strikes.
Give yourself the space necessary to reflect, and therefore grow.
2. Empathize with Your User
A big part of design is empathy. It’s understanding what type of person is using this app, this website or looking at your poster. You have to know what they’re looking for and what they’re struggling with in order to fulfill those needs.
…and there’s two users you’ll need to empathize with in your life.
Empathy for Yourself
In this world, I think we can be a bit hard on ourselves sometimes. We assume that with enough logic and facts we can overpower our indulgent emotions, when it really comes down to understanding them.
We berate ourselves when we are overwhelmed with feeling or lacking self-control, but really this does little to resolve the issue. In fact, I would say it exacerbates it.
If you had a bad argument with a friend, and end up spending 2 hours angrily scribbling into your journal or watching Netflix to distract yourself, in hindsight you might get pissed off at yourself for wasting all that time when you had other things to do.
The problem is, if you get pissed off at yourself for wasting all that time, you’re simply leaving yourself more emotionally distraught than you were originally— which is what was stopping you from being productive in the first place. So you’re back to square one.
What you need to do, is to empathize. As designers, our roles are to help people get things done within our product or service. But if you don’t make the process easy and intuitive for them, they’re not going to do it.
You lose, they lose.
The same applies here.
Here’s a quick process I think is helpful for getting back on track:
- Acknowledge what you did
- Give yourself a bit of empathy and optimism
- Think about the satisfaction from doing what needs to be done.
- Make a plan
- Follow the plan
This is what this plan looks like in reality.
Say I lashed out at a friend and then spent a few hours moping about it, I’m pissed at myself, but we’re going to stop this negative feedback loop.
1) I acknowledge that I did a bad thing, both to my friend and following the conflict. I could have done x, y, and z but the only thing I can change is what I do with my time now, right? Right.
2) Emotions are tough and hard to control, my friend brought up some things that struck a nerve, so it makes a bit of sense I responded this way. I shouldn't do that next time, but it’s okay, I can try to mend things over.
3) Ugh, I’m afraid of apologizing to her and I don’t want to finish my physics assignment, but damn it would give me a lot of closure for her to at least know I’m sorry for what I did. Plus, after finishing my physics homework I get to watch Netflix guilt free.
4) Okay, I’m gonna think about what I want to say to my friend for the next few minutes or so. I’m gonna call or text her right after, take brief notes on chapters 5 and 6 of my textbook and then do 3 circuit problems.
5) This is the hardest step no matter how much empathy you have, but it’s easier to accomplish in a good mood than a bad one.
This plan isn’t easy, and it’s going to take time. It’ll take multiple tries and you might even get more upset with yourself, but it pays off in the long run.
As Mark Manson describes in his book, Everything is F*cked, the Feeling-brain drives the car, and the Thinking-brain is just along for the ride.
Yelling at the driver won’t make them want to listen to you. You need to be kind and gentle and help them come to the same understanding. Emotion can only be rationalized with other emotions. Plus, learning to be empathetic with yourself will help you practice being empathetic towards others.
Empathy for Others
Be kind to other people. When friends come to you for support and advice, in order to really be able to “solve their problem” you need to be able to understand where they’re coming from.
You can’t assume you know what they’re struggling with. This is why entrepreneurs and designers are constantly conducting user-testing and market-research. If you create a business to solve a problem that doesn’t exist, you’ve wasted your time and money. Except in this case, you’ve pissed off your friend too.
We all want to help the people that matter most to us. But we can only do that if we know what we’re helping. Being empathetic will make others more comfortable and open to sharing these important details with you, and allows you to understand how to approach the problem.
Because in the end, you can’t shoot an arrow at a target you can’t see.
3. Contrast is Key
When we design websites, apps, posters etc. big headers, shapes or buttons look especially large when juxtaposed with their much smaller counterparts, and vice versa.
It’s important for us to live our lives with contrast. When we fill our life with similar experiences — those that fit within this box we’ve drawn for ourselves or constantly within our comfort zone — our life experiences become mundane and boring, at least in relation to each other. There isn’t any particular emotional experience that stands out in any which way.
You know the saying, “you can’t know what happiness is until you’ve felt sadness”?
This is it.
Tall is only tall around short things. Thick letters are only thick around thin objects. Even if they’re not side by side, your constant exposure to various objects or letters has already conditioned in you a certain frame of reference with which you compare everything to.
Again, the same goes for your life.
If you constantly seek comfort, none of your experiences will stand out to you or elicit the appreciation and emotional oomph that they once gave you and rightly deserve. Similarly, if you constantly seek discomfort, sure you’ll try new things, but you also never feel a baseline. It simply becomes an endless chase for more and more thrilling activities.
In the end, contrast = clarity. Contrast in design makes our text punchy, our headings prominent, and our images prominent.
Contrast in our lives makes both our lives and our identities clearer. For example, talking to people we like and don’t like helps us notice what we want and don’t want in ourselves.
In the end, it’s awfully hard to appreciate the good without knowing the bad or to recognize what’s bad without knowing what’s good. And frankly speaking, you can’t really know whether a lifestyle or study habit is bad or good until you’ve tried it either. So don’t be afraid of the idea of encountering a bit of both.
Don’t be afraid of different experiences.
Don’t be afraid of losing yourself.
All you’re doing is making things clearer.
**DISCLAIMER: proceed with caution and listen to experts nonetheless. You don’t need to try burning yourself or contracting a virus to know it’s going to suck.
4. Find Harmony and Unity
In some ways you could say harmony contradicts contrast, but ultimately, it’s important to have a balance of both.
In the end you constantly want to explore new ideas, lifestyles or principles, but all of this experimentation is so you now know what’s the best for you to stick to — at least for a while.
When you start to recognize what values and principles really resonate with you, you should find practices that embody that, that are in “harmony” with who you are/want to be, and ultimately unifies your life.
Even if you are trying out different things to give that sense of contrast in your life, the activities you know matter to you are the fabric upon which you may or may not decide to sew these new activities onto.
If you want a “green” quilt, that doesn’t mean there can’t be hints or patterns of blue or red or black on there. In fact, these other colours can help accentuate or complement the green-ness of your quilt. It’s what differentiates you from the other 10,000 green quilts out there.
Artists often use under-paintings to achieve the same effect. If they’re painting a forest, they’ll first paint their canvas red, the “opposite” colour of green. Red is officially referred to as green’s “complementary” colour because that’s what it does. It complements it, and interestingly enough, by contrast.
Maintaining harmony and unity with your most important choices is what brings it all together. It’s what prevents the whole “I don’t know who I am” existential crisis when we try to embody too many things.
Trying out a new cereal, a new diet, a new morning routine isn’t going to completely alter the fabric of your identity. But choosing how you treat others, how you approach discomfort, or your greatest moral dilemmas will.
Make those last few choices wisely.
And as you continue to explore and even settle down on your values, make sure you really love the colour of the quilt you’re sewing.
Sew it in a way that you know (at least for now) that you’ll love looking at it for the next 20, 30 years of your life. That it keeps you warm on the coldest nights, and really represents the kind of person you want to be.
Let’s wrap it up.
Minimalism, Empathy, Contrast, and Harmony. These are the 4 design principles I’ve found have really changed my take on life and hopefully have inspired some changes in yours too.
I hope for all of you out there to be able to find the fulfillment and the kinds of people you want to be. To not be afraid to explore what you want, to stop and smell the roses and be able to appreciate every facet of life to its fullest. It doesn’t have to be today, and it doesn’t even need to be next week.
But you have to start somewhere, so why not sooner than later?
Start designing the life you want to live.
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