Speaking of the joy in the journey and other similar platitudes about taking pleasure in the moment (see next door), I’ve never met anyone better at pulling off this existential party trick, than my husband, Stefan. Last week, he took his present-focused self to Israel to try to impart this skill, along with a bit of his product design philosophy to a lucky bunch of students at The Coleman School of Management in Tel Aviv. The weeklong workshop was a grand success due in large part because of his insistence that the first step a designer should take in arriving at a useful product isn’t to start by envisioning the end goal, imagining what the future thing might look like, or even what it might do, or by applying learned design philosophy and skills to an arbitrary issue. Instead, he asked them to do something no one had ever asked them to do at the beginning of the design process, he asked them to examine their lives and the world around them with a discerning eye, their lives at that very moment, in that place, at that time, and in that way uncover a worthy problem for which they alone could develop a unique solution given their very personal experience. Know your world, so that you can contribute something valuable to it. And likewise know yourself, so you can contribute something valuable to your own life. Seems like a compelling argument to keep from jumping too far ahead. Smell the Spring flowers and all that jazz.
