written by Stacey Lindsay

Ayse Birsel has credibly added more joy and ease to our lives than we likely realize. The acclaimed industrial designer, who came to New York City from Turkey on a Fulbright in the mid-80s, has designed hundreds of award-winning products for global giants such as Herman Miller, GE, and Toyota. One of the copious examples to note: She’s the genius behind TOTO’s award-winning Zoë Washlet. Designing solutions is her forte. 

More recently, Ayse has applied her knack for innovation to her “biggest design project” yet: life. In her recent book Design the Long Life You Love: A Step-by-Step Guide to Love, Purpose, Well-Being, and Friendship. Ayse, who is in her late 50s, maps out a refreshingly honest and decidedly fun way to tackle problems and build a joy-filled existence. The key is to think like a designer. “You can be of any age, vocation, or place to do it,” she tells us. “All people are creative. And we can transform our lives through our creativity.”

Chatting with Ayse Birsel

You write, "When it comes to our lives, we are our own innovators." Please walk us through this. 

We forget that we're all original individuals. We all have our own life, and we're the users of that life. Of course, we live with other people, luckily. We have families and friends and teams. Still, your life is your own to make what you want of it. And within that life, you can innovate, think creatively, and try things.

Our life is our biggest design project. It's full of challenges, constraints, and criteria. You can apply a design process to it. That started as an experiment for me, where I developed my own design process. It started as a proof point, this idea that our life is a design project, and then took off from there. 

You encourage people to use a pen to literally map out life desires and plans. Why do you believe there’s power in putting pen to paper?

My thoughts change when I hold a pen in my hand, when I draw, or when I write. If I really want to express myself, I write longhand. There's so much more heart put into it. It's hard for me to explain. I know that it works. There is a direct correlation between your brain, your movements, and what comes out at the end of your pen.  

In my experience, doing this makes things valid. When I write or doodle something, the act of putting it onto paper brings it from my head and allows it to take a new form. 

The word ‘purpose’ can seem so abstract, but you outline a more actionable and accessible way of looking at it. Will you talk about this and how can we build purpose in our lives?

Purpose is an abstract concept. It's a meta concept. It can come easier to us earlier in life because most social structures are designed to give us a sense of purpose: First school, then your work, then you start making a living. You might fall in love and start a family, which gives you purpose because you want to support each other. All these things—school, work, family—are well defined. We don't have to think about them. Then over time, those things either recede or change. I see many people in their 40s and 50s, who've been successful, start to wonder, This is it?

“Our life is our biggest design project.”

That's why I wanted to discuss the idea that having purpose creates meaning. When I mapped this out, I realized a transformation happens from ready-made purpose to self-made purpose. This gave me hope because if purpose is something we can make, and I can define what ways of making it, then we can be purposeful and intentional about creating those instances. There is an automatic quality and ease to ready-made purpose. And for the self-made piece, there is intention and agency. 

So how do you create meaning? You can create meaning by helping others, being of service to others, learning, teaching, standing up for something you believe in, and starting new projects. All these things give us a place in the world and create meaning for us. And that means that we can do that earlier. We don't have to draw our sense of purpose only from work or family. It can become richer.

How did the idea for designing life come about, especially after decades of success in designing products?

I wrote this book for myself. I started thinking about aging about 10 years ago because my parents were aging. I wondered, Is this the future? How can I help my parents? And how can I help my future self? Now I'm in my late 50s and thinking about making changes in my life. 

As we get older, we get used to doing things and succeeding. So I wanted to take less risk. I wanted to know everything before I changed something, I wanted to think about it at length. And I caught myself being afraid to make changes and to go toward the unknown. I have a coach who is a great mentor to me, and he taught me about 10xing, which is going towards the unknown and growing 10x from being uncomfortable. 

We're good at going towards the unknown when we're young. We go to college, we move in with people we don't know, we start a job, and this is the first time we've done it. From that process, we grow 10x. Yet as we get older, we slow down on that. I caught myself being too cautious until I heard my mentor say this. It was an ah-ha moment for me. 

What surprised you when writing this book?

There's an optimism to design to take a problem and come up with ideas to solve it. Generating solutions gives you a sense of optimism that no matter how hard the problem is, you can come up with a solution—and that pushes you toward the future. 

I was having a hard time doing it for myself. I told people it was like how the shoemakers' kids are without shoes. That is until I realized it's not that I can't design my life. It's that I'd become fearful. So, I tell people, it takes courage to design your life. To have personal growth, you must embrace uncertainty and the unknown. The good news is, we've all done that before. With all the forks in our life, we've made decisions. We've followed our instincts, our guts, our ideas. So we need to continue doing that.

Design is a great tool to imagine what you don't know. That's the whole idea with this book: Nobody knows the future. What we know is today. From that, we can imagine different outcomes. And when you can imagine different outcomes, you can see what is exciting to you and you can try that. You can find the courage to say, 'I'm gonna try this my own way.'

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You can learn more about Ayse at aysebirsel.com and order her latest book at designthelonglifeyoulove.com

Interview by Stacey Lindsay. Parts of this conversation have been edited and condensed for clarity. 

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