Dave Evans on Designing Your Life

Meet the Speaker - Dave Evans

From saving the seals to solving the energy crisis, from imagining the first computer mice to redefining software — Dave Evans has been on a mission, including helping others to find theirs. Starting at Stanford with dreams of following Jacques Cousteau as a marine biologist, Dave realized (a bit late) that he was lousy at it and shifted to mechanical engineering with an eye on the energy problem. After four years in alternative energy, it was clear that this idea’s time hadn’t come yet. So while en route to biomedical engineering, Dave accepted an invitation to work for Apple, where he led product marketing for  the mouse team and introduced laser printing to the masses. When Dave’s boss at Apple left to start Electronic Arts, Dave joined as the company’s first VP of Talent, dedicated to making “software worthy of the minds that use it.” Having participated in forming the corporate cultures at Apple and EA, Dave decided his best work was in helping organizations build creative environments where people could do great work and love doing it. So he went out on his own; working with start-up teams, corporate executives, non-profit leaders, and countless young adults. They were all asking the same question. “What should I do with my life?” Helping people get traction on that question finally took Dave to Cal and Stanford and continues to be his life’s work. Dave holds a BS and MS in Mechanical Engineering from Stanford and a graduate diploma in Contemplative Spirituality from San Francisco Theological Seminary.

Designing Your Life by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans

At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage

Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home–at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve.

In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise.

For information, visit the Designing Your Life website.

Designing Your New Work Life by Bill Burnett & Dave Evans

With updated tools, tips, and design ideas that show us how to navigate disruption (global, regional, or personal) and create new possibilities for our post-COVID work world and beyond.

Highlights of Designing Your New Work Life content include:

• Disruption is the New Normal – It’s Always Personal and It’s Here to Stay
• The Humans in the Room – Get More Human or Risk Joining The Big Quit
• Get Out of the Waiting Room & Into The Acceptance Zone
• Wayfinding: The Critical Disruption Design Skill – Four Power Steps to Be a Pro Wayfinder
• Relentless ReDesign: the Solution to Non-Stop Disruption is Non-Stop Design

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans successfully taught graduate and undergraduate students at Stanford University and readers of their best-selling book, Designing Your Life (“The prototype for a happy life.”—Brian Lehrer, NPR), that designers don’t analyze, worry, think, complain their way forward; they build their way forward. And now more than ever, we all need creative and adaptable tools to cope with the chaos caused by COVID-19.

In Designing Your New Work Life, Burnett and Evans show us how design thinking can transform our present job, and how it can improve our experience of work in times of disruption. “All disruption is personal,” write Burnett and Evans, “as with the life-altering global pandemic we are living through now.” Designing Your New Work Life makes clear that disruption is the new normal, that it is here to stay and that it is accelerating. And in the book’s new chapters, Burnett and Evans show us step by step, how to design our way through disruption and how to stay ahead of it—and thrive.

Burnett and Evans’s Disruption Design offers us a radical new concept that makes use of the designer mindsets: Curiosity, Reframing, Radical collaboration, Awareness, Bias to action, Storytelling, to find our way through these unchartered times.

Burnett and Evans show us, with tools, tips, and design ideas, how we can make new possibilities available even when our lives have been disrupted (be it globally, regionally, or personally), giving us the tools to enjoy the present moment and allowing us to begin to prototype our possible future.

For more information, visit the Designing Your New Work Life website.

Dave Evans on Veritas Forum

Dave Evans appeared on the podcast Veritas Forum – listen here!

Career searches often begin with the same question: “What’s my passion?” If you’re in a period of job transition — maybe you’re about to graduate, retire, or have felt like a new job is on the horizon — Veritas Forum want to help. And, they don’t think that “passion” is the best place to start. Join them as they talk with Dave Evans, New York Times best-selling author of Designing Your Life and Stanford professor, about what questions we should be asking when it comes to making our next steps vocationally.

For more information about Veritas Forum, please visit their website.

Designing Your Career video series from the Stanford Life Design Lab

This series of animated videos presents concepts for “vocational wayfinding” from the Stanford Life Design Lab.

Additional Resources

• Designing Your Work Life by Dave Evans and Bill Burnett
• Visions of Vocation by Steve Garber
• Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
• The Second Mountain by David Brooks
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• “The Christian Companion to Designing Your Life” by Dave Evans

View the Event

Presented by

Monday, April 17, 2023 12:00 pm

Dave Evans began his career as an engineer, pioneering new technologies at Apple and then helping co-found Electronic Arts. He realized what he loved most in his work was helping build creative environments where people could do work that was meaningful and important. Along with Bill Burnett, he co-founded the Stanford Life Design Lab, wrote the bestselling Designing Your Life, and has been helping people use the design process in pursuit of individual and collective flourishing.

We are thrilled Dave joined us on April 17, 2023 for a conversation about his work. We discussed how life design can inform our teaching in higher education and how it can help those of us in the working world navigate our professions with purpose. We also considered how work is changing, and how to approach these issues through the lens of flourishing and the common good.