Design Your Life by the Laws of Nature

The ambitious subject of shaping your life while following nature’s principles — swallow. Are you ready to explore this for a moment? Alternatively, you could turn around and shape your abdominal muscles through physical exercise. That’s more concrete. No judgment.

For those that stick around, let’s say life at large is made up of many mini moments. Perhaps the here and now, the IS is the best seizable unit to affect. You breathe, you live, you feel and think, you interpret. It is so crucial what you attend to or automate and also what you automated and then attend to again. It is crucial what you allow and invest in, and what you cut short and send away.

Many quotes and memes remind us of the fact that the entirety is the sum of many lived days. Thanks to Instagram’s reposts and Pinterest’s walls, you consume this again and again. Thanks to your yoga teacher, she reminds you when you are fully present and not distracted.

The question of how to design your whole life by impacting on it in the here and now may arise. “What am I supposed to do about it? Just tell me how!” That’s fair!

The Design Your Life (DYL) Method

The approach of designing your life assumes that by proceeding through five steps, you will labor and enjoy through a somewhat typical experience to arrive at a good enough outcome. In this case: a design sketch that is an improvement and progress. Those five steps are typically:

1. Empathize: Feel & tune into the area of life and the issue from the person’s perspective that is of interest for redesign
2. Define: Describe the issue in clear languages for a problem statement
3. Ideate: Go wide & diverge on ideas to solve the defined problem.
4. Prototype: Develop a temporary solution for the defined problem based on empathy, constrained by the definition and inspired by the ideating exploration.
5. Test: Apply the prototype in a good enough setting. Try it on your body, use it in the situation, make him say it and collect data from this text.

Then repeat from 1–5 again.

In my eyes, it is less a question of what one is supposed to do and rather one of what you want and value to do. I value the creative, designerly approach because it is interesting and effective for and in my work. I have tried other change methods, such as psychoanalysis to treat parent child relationships. They didn’t work. So I abandoned them. Or self medicating with substances. So I abandoned them.

Combining DYL with the Natures of Law

The design approach is simply an approach and it becomes much larger - magical even — when applied and in the hands of people that have a vision, a personal challenge to address and face constraints. Think of a son who lost his father to rare cancer and now designs wellbeing apps? Or a Guatemalan who saw lack of English proficiency holding back economic growth of this fellow people. Or a psychologist who was missing creative & positive psychology in change work.

If you couple the design approach with the laws of nature, nature then both inspires and constraints the design process.

The laws of nature (or “natural law”) are regularities in the world seen as independent from humans and their “man-made” laws such as state or political laws. The law of nature is nature and its phenomena presenting itself to us and else. The laws exist and are recognizable or not.

For instance, a stone mid air will follow a law of nature and fall to the ground. It follows the law of gravity. Newton is said to have first described this law (yet let us not now dive into storytelling). He also described the three nature laws of motion and the ideal gas laws. Mendel described laws such as the laws of supply and demand. And contemporary futurist Lisanne Buik closes a loop by highlighting a need to realign with nature. She poses the larger question of “what values we live by” rather than be more narrow-sighted question of what are good algorithms or what about AI.

While a thorough discussion of design methods and the laws of nature is beyond the scope of this post, both methods in combination allow for a grand momentous opportunity: Let us see with the most open mind possible, what the cosmos is saying to us (free after Carl Sagan, 1982) — if we realigned DYL to the laws of nature.

Examples of Laws (principles) of Nature

Now let us descend from the high ivory tower of lofty and conceptual language. What are examples of laws of nature? If you read this at the park, how could you recognize their power?

• the law of energy — thermodynamics: the total energy of an isolated system is constant; energy can be neither created nor destroyed. Look at your coca cola bottle (a closed system) — no bubble nor calorie gets out, if the cap is on. The banana is a closed system, in this analogy. “One medium banana will typically have about 105 calories, whether it is as green as the grass or as brown as the dirt.”
• law of energy or “entropy”: Entropy is the gradual decline to disorder or “The irreversibility of natural processes that lead towards spatial homogeneity of matter and energy, especially of temperature.” Imagine your living room tidy at first, and then disintegration over the course of a day.
• law of constant change: Everything in life is in constant change, in the process of becoming something else. Nothing stays exactly as it is. Movement and change constitute the reality of our being. Think of your couple issues. If they fall under this law, you actually face different issues over time.. because he/she changes, you changes, and the issues change. Is that relief?
• Murphy’s law: Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Yet this does not have to be the case in your example and population while in all existing scenarios, it will go wrong somewhere sometime somehow.
• nature recycles everything (biomimicry principle) :
• nature runs on sunlight (biomimicry principle)
• nature demands local expertise (biomimicry principle)
• nature fits form to function (biomimicry principle)

Selected insights from Livestream on “DYL w/ laws of nature” between PixelStoryStudio& Lisanne Buik on 20.5.

The beauty of this intellectual thought-provoking post now lies in the exercise of sitting with this match “made in heaven”. It is your turn to

• make it personal to your situation. Your need as well as vision in this given situation will determine what you attach to and continue with.
• add your interpretation of “design” and “life” and even “nature”
• make it an experience and something you can try out. From intellectual > experiential.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of bravery and confidence in going with your gut instinct. If you ask me “Can I design my finances.. the issue with X according to a law of nature?”- I’d say: “Why not!”

Please share your applications, thoughts and corrections to this post directly with me. I am sure my original standpoint will change :) info@pixelstorystudio.com