Stop Telling Yourself Stories, Start Building Designs
The Difference Between Narrative and Design Mindsets
There is an inkling bubbling beneath your conscious-eye. It is blotted out by the voices of parents, siblings, previous teachers or even your peers, which are are all clearer and ingrained in the rich tapestry of multi-sensory memory and experience. It is telling you to question something in your present experience: maybe your job, relationship, lifestyle, or mood. A need somewhere is seemingly unfulfilled. But no one else seems to agree.
How do you uncover that inkling? How do you justify giving it light of the day and even—gasp—following it? There is no manifest path there. How would I even meaningfully begin?
I wish I had followed such an inkling when deciding whether or not to go back to college, and if so, how. Sarah Lawrence College was a great fit for my inability to declare a major and my rapidly shifting curiosities; it fit with my repulsion for grades in favor of metrics which I felt better measured personal engagement and growth. But choosing to transfer there still did not fulfill my base need: a want for employability. By listening to the stories of my parents and others, I was led to believe that going to college was going to be the only solution to fulfilling my need.
Fortunately, I recently came across the world of design. I have learned a lot since (including something about a hopefully-employable direction I can steer my life towards). But perhaps the most impactful lesson I have gathered thus far is a distinction between Narrative and Design Mindsets.
What is a Narrative Mindset?
A narrative mindset is the one most of us have grown up with. We hear about stories of grabbing oneself up from the bootstraps, of hard work and seizing onto the first sliver of experienced passion before riding it to victory.
When someone becomes successful, we tend to ask them how that happened. We look for clues, like if there childhood dreams had any signs pointing to their current vocation. We try to thread the needle between all the individual experiences of their complex, entire lives. We look for the story that explains how success, for them, was perhaps inevitable.
Stories aren’t bad. They’re probably a very valuable asset to the human condition, providing sustenance on a soul level when shit-hits-the-fan. They make for great art and great conversation alike. They also serve as highly adapted technologies for transmitting big and expensively-earned lessons in compressed forms. My friend, Sarah Perry, writes:
Items of culture encode and contain intelligence relevant to human goals. But they are themselves entities under selection (…) Successful institutions evolve mechanisms for their own maintenance, such as awe-inspiring religious music or the hazing rituals used by fraternities.
Sometimes we even try to fulfill the narrative-expectations of others, whether those people are our parents, colleagues, or friends. Why can’t you be normal, and do the normal life-thing, like going to college, getting a job, and raising a family? Why can’t you do all that, and be happy at the same time?
Sadly, life is a bit more chaotic than in movies or books. As a self professed Bokonist, I concede that sometimes luxuriating in life’s many absurd ironies and beautiful coincidences, which seem all-too-fictional to be true, does wonders for the soul.
But everything in my lived experiences suggests that relying on life to be continuous, neatly ordered, reliable, or predictable is a death-wish. I do believe a certain amount of trauma is built into the human condition. Everyone dies. But even that small business you’ve been carefully nurturing for the past several years? It could only take an unexpected, 21st century pandemic, like Covid-19, to completely unground it.
The sooner you get comfortable with loss, the sooner you can equip yourself with the flexibility needed to weather most situations. I spent the greater portion of the last year rebuilding myself, physically, after working with a personal trainer and then switching to Stronglifts 5X5 on my own (I was overweight for several years). With Covid-19 underway, I am being forced to make peace with gradually withering gains. I have had to embrace that boxing, made possible by my pandemic-host’s heavy punching bag, and cardio, like daily dog walks, are my friends, now. These things are no real substitute for the pump (or for my gains), but they’re at least something, and I can afford to relax my expectations of myself.
Even though I could not maintain my object-level practice of SL5X5, I retained the meta-level lesson underlying my development: you have to rebuild yourself. You will invariably betray the promises your past-self made to herself: I’ll never have to start from the beginning again, I’ll never do this to myself again, I won’t be in this situation, I’ll learn from my lesson, and this is me, now and forever.
Get comfortable with it. Forgive yourself when your stamina is in the gutter, and have faith in the process. You’ll be surprised what a small portfolio of tiny, but consistent, victories can add up to.
Stories are ultimately subject to the same process of natural selection that our genes are. They move through our actions, convincing us, whether through spoken words of your mother, written word in a novel, or thoughts passing through our narrative-hungry minds, to take actions and uphold their scripts. Like evolution, you can assume an active role in drawing adaptations to life’s challenges. You can test different scripts and assume a flexible mindset that treats change, mutation, and challenge as a given. You don’t have to compromise on the outcomes you desire. But you can relax your expectations around the manners in which they are fulfilled.
As I mentioned earlier, though I finished going to college having been motivated by the narrative that “college equals employability,” I failed to take an active and intentional hand in solving the problem I actually cared about. Perhaps through discouragement from some of my peers, mentors, and family, I stopped considering compelling alternative options like code bootcamps or apprenticeships. I assumed a passive role by relying on narrative truth to carry me towards where I wanted to be: employed with a fulfilling and moderately-decent-paying role. I didn’t want to disappoint the well-intentioned people in my life who relied on this narrative to carry them through life. As the cool kids say, many such cases.
Introducing the Design Mindset
Rather than diving into life with presumptions and hand-me-down narrative-shortcuts, why not approach life with the mindset of a designer? A designer looks at a problem with no presumptions. A designer first identifies what, exactly, is the problem, or need that is requiring attention. (Often, the problem assumes a shape you did not expect. For example, a person wanting to labor but also relish domestic comforts may be more fulfilled as a homemaker, and can find opportunity to reframe domestic situations as more compelling outlets for their labor-needs.) A designer approaches the user from a place of empathy and conducts some research to understand the user’s lived experience.
You don’t have a designer working on solving the problems for your life. (But you can invest in yourself and hire help.) In your case, you are both the designer and the user.
Perry, in her later works, speaks of two subselves that exist in dialectic with one another: the “owner” and “dog” selves.
I propose another sub-selves dialectic: the designer and user selves. I will explicate on this model here:
The designer takes a third-person perspective on the self; the user takes a direct, experiencing, first-person perspective.
The designer is biased-to-action. The user is shaped by their past.
The designer receives information; the user provides it.
The designer is outcome driven. The user typically presents a problem, need, or inconvenience.
The designer is into building things. The user is into trying them.
The designer is able to create opportunities, set intentions, and iterate on feedback. The user takes action and is able to experience, feel, and communicate things.
The designer provides possibilities. The user tests possibilities as solutions.
When trying to fill missing gaps in your life, it is best to first conduct some user experience (UX) research to identity exactly the shape of the need you are trying to fulfill. Narratives can sometimes act like traps, convincing us that a desire to labor must look like conventional approaches, such as 9-to-5 work, when that desire might be better filled through other possibilities (if not homemaking, then perhaps freelance, part time, volunteer, or seasonal work.) By leveling with yourself about the true shape of the need you wish you serve, you can be honest in your attempts.
Strive to become the most effective advocate for yourself, the user. The user self contains the unique ability to feel and need things. The user self, alone, has access to precious information as to the direct nature of experience, even the ability to then relegate it. By simultaneously holding onto the spirit of a designer, you can help keep the user from developing complacency and guide them towards growth by receiving their messages with earnestness and a bias-to-action.
Build prototypes. Test your solutions in order to help ensure you are not wasting time. Talk to other peoples about their experiences, i.e. conduct UX research on them. As mentioned in my previous piece, Productivity is a Fuck, approaching your life from a perspective of design tailored around you, the ultimate user, helps make even yucky “work”-work more approachable or bearable.
Though people in your life may not agree with all your prototypes, they may feel some relief upon discovering that the unconventional solution is also not necessarily the solution you are married to. Scripts are not cheap. They are built over several years of cultural evolution.
As a designer, you retain neither a bias for unconventional nor conventional solutions. Any reasonably plausible solution is treated with an equalizing respect. And you depend on experiments, such as prototypes, to illuminate which possibilities are more promising.
The system of designer and user is only one system of several which may be effective for solving and/or alleviating your problems. But it may be uniquely helpful for making an active stance of a seemingly passive one. By questioning the narratives that often propel us, perhaps we dislodge ourselves from the waiting-rooms we often find ourselves stuck in and free ourselves the nagging of unfollowed inklings (which may otherwise perish as regrets.)
This is fantastic advice, your insight is something I've felt but couldn't verbalize.
"When someone becomes successful...We look for the story that explains how success, for them, was perhaps inevitable."
The above quote stood out to me personally. The way I understand it is that we seek the narrative of the successful person when we should be seeking the design. The design is often more mundane and takes longer to explain. Hearing enough stories of successful narratives we become obsessed thinking that if we could just shape the right narrative we too would be successful.
Enjoyed this, and I hope you keep exploring applying design thinking to the task of living one’s life. Also, thanks for introducing me to Bokononism! May have to read cat’s cradle now.