How IDEO helped me become a 'life' designer.

I'd like to think I was always a designer!

As a kid, like all kids, I designed games and activities that helped me learn stuff and stay entertained. As a teenager, I tinkered around with bikes, clothes, hair and all those things that most teenagers tinker with. And fortunately, although I did get into a business education, I remained in fairly creative businesses that allowed me to keep designing. 

When I was at INSEAD, a lot of people told me that I was cut out to work at a place like IDEO, but they didn't have the right job for me at the time. So I joined Booze Allen as they were becoming Booze & Co. Finding them too left brained for me, I returned to India and launched what was technically my 5th startup (my first was when I was 19 - selling beanbags).  This was my second venture in the 'design' business and was before the word startup became this fashionable. It was also a time when you could only be a fashion designer or an interior designer or a graphic designer. At times although, I did risk saying I was a business designer!

Funnily enough, years later, IDEO headhunted me! After I joined IDEO, I became more conscious of how, as Steve Jobs said, 'design is how it works'.  A service could be designed as well as a product or a space. Strategy was designed alongside experiences and interactions. Healthcare and education could be designed, as could brands and their identities. And finally, I was alongside people who like me, found it difficult to explain what they did! 

More importantly, I was able to experience how emotional intelligence and empathy have to go hand in hand with general or intellectual intelligence to create great design. I was able to help create and then immerse myself in a helpful, collaborative culture that thrived on optimism and where people had fun creating impactful and cool stuff. Failing was encouraged and success bred humility. Design thinking demanded that everyone be non judgemental and open to different perspectives. People were, by and large, happy. Happy with themselves and others, happy with their work, happy with their lives!

Last year, living in a zen monastery with Buddhist monks, trying to master the art of mindfulness, I was struck by the similarities! Over long conversations that ensued with some of the senior monks, I realised that design thinking is a close country cousin of mindfulness, and that through the use of both, one can actually manifest the life one dreams of! I realised that maybe subconsciously, I have done just that. And I discovered my purpose. My raison d’être!

I'm a designer. A 'life' designer.

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