A Designer’s Perspective on Parenthood: The Very Best Way to Ruin Your Life
Why the special tools we have as designers can and should be used to make better sense of our lives.
I had the typical high school experience: I made great friends, got my braces off, and, generally, didn’t love going to class. 11th-grade trigonometry was my low point, and I felt helpless trying to learn something that didn’t make sense to me. Suffering so terribly to learn something that didn’t have a practical application made even less sense. I struggled to understand how all of that frustration was supposed to make my life better.
Learning at that time was a chore, and despite the school’s best intentions, I wasn’t exposed to tools to help me make sense of the world around me or a framework for teaching myself. Don’t get me wrong — I loved some of my teachers and developed many friendships I still have today, but I never gained a sense of how empowering and enriching learning truly is. Simply put, high school felt like four years of total bullshit.
I continued to struggle without a methodology for reflecting and making sense of my experiences until I went to design school. While there, I learned from mentors who believed wholeheartedly in the power of human-centered design. Their stories of applying design thinking to their own lives reverberated with me as I began to utilize frameworks for unwinding big, tricky problems.
With a new way to process the world around me, I started asking other questions: If we have the tools and process to understand human problems in order to create viable solutions to address them — why don’t we apply those same principles to help ourselves?
Becoming a practicing designer was an important step for me. It gave me a framework, a process, and most importantly, grew my capacity for empathy. All of this has allowed me to deeply understand others’ problems and address them with real solutions, while also giving me the ability to better understand my own life experiences.
Fast forward from design school…
Last year I had a baby. And as we’ve all heard a million times, having a baby changes everything.
While I anticipated big changes, I didn’t anticipate struggling to understand how I was different, what had changed, and how to best communicate my new world. Instead of using the “everything is different” crutch, I needed to dive deeper into the what and why of it all. I also needed to understand my partner’s perspective — how his life changed, how our relationship changed, and how he experienced shifts both joyous and challenging.
So, I created a drawing on a napkin about how my emotional spectrum has been stretched by parenthood.
I showed this drawing to my husband. He connected with it at first glance, and added that for him, depth of experience would be added to the spectrum; this was an essential part of his experience he hadn’t previously described to me.
Back at work, I used my diagram as a provocative conversation starter with colleagues who also had kids. I hoped to uncover how parenthood had changed our lives and also hear how their experience may diverge from mine. I also showed this diagram to colleagues that didn’t have children, to better connect with them and share a few laughs about how parenthood can ruin your life (for me, in the best way possible). Several months after returning to work, I shared my diagram with one colleague in particular with whom I had been collaborating closely on a project. He mentioned how he was able to better understand my new perspective after seeing my drawing:
“Even though I didn’t work with you before you had Weston, I could tell you were using your experience as a new mother to understand and empathize more deeply, even while working on a rather rigid finance product like we were at the time. I wasn’t able to verbalize why, really, until I saw your diagram — it made it all click.”
My napkin sketch became a catalyst for understanding the power of simple visualization to articulate an idea that’s difficult to describe quickly. It’s a method that I’ve used to communicate with clients for years now, and has become a tool I use to improve my own understanding of my experience as a new parent, while also helping spark enriching conversations with the people in my life.
When it felt like verbal communication wasn’t enough, I dug into my design toolbox to create an artifact for conveying my experiences. If you’re anything like me — whether you’re a new parent, new to our field, or going through another life moment — taking some time to think about how the tools and processes you use in your design practice every day can help clarify and articulate your feelings and understanding of your experiences.
Simple exercises like these can better connect you to your world and to the people around you, in turn making you a happier, more thoughtful, and empathetic designer.
Drop me a note in the comments if you’ve been able to use anything from your designer’s toolbox to better connect you to your world. I’d love to hear yours, and continue sharing stories like these.
