Ayse Birsel is an award-winning industrial designer, design thinker, and design educator. She is the co-founder of Birsel + Seck, a design and consulting studio, and the author of Design the Life You Love: A Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Meaningful Future. Ayse has been designing for more than two decades, working with brands like Herman Miller, Brooklyn Museum, and Vitra. She has received numerous awards for her work, including the iF Design Award, the Red Dot Design Award, and the Core77 Design Award. She is passionate about helping people design the lives they love through her work. She has been a design educator at institutions such as MIT, Parsons, and the Pratt Institute. She is also a sought-after speaker for conferences and events. Ayse’s mission is to “empower people to create meaningful lives and meaningful products through the power of design.”
People today are living longer and healthier lives than ever before, but when we think of aging and the span of our lives, we rarely think of those older years and what we want our lives to look like. Ayse Birsel wrote "Design the Long Life You Love" to encourage people to reframe their approach to problems in life and to inspire individuals and businesses to embrace the opportunities of aging. Through her year-long research, she found that older people were thrilled to be alive and wanted to share this enthusiasm with the world. By writing this book, she hopes to spread awareness of the advantages of aging and to provide a step-by-step process for people to design their own lives.
Ayse Birsel's advice for designing a life you love is to start by giving yourself permission to do so. She emphasizes the importance of being true to yourself and creating a life that is based on your values and that looks and feels like you. Birsel then suggests deconstructing your life and breaking it into its parts and pieces in order to get clarity on what matters to you and to understand the connections that you assume are between things. Finally, she encourages people to not attempt to put their lives back together the same way it was before but to instead create something new.
The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway
“Think of a hero of yours, somebody who inspires you. This could be somebody you know, family or friends, or somebody you know of. What qualities of theirs do you admire? Those are your values. This is what you design with. This is how you make choices.”
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