Purpose | Tool List | Tool Guide | Life Stories | Full List
Part 1: Purpose and Key Question
Define Impactful Goals
Purpose: Reframe challenges and opportunities into clear, actionable goals that align with your core values and aspirations. This stage focuses on prioritizing what truly matters to create a purposeful direction in life and career planning.
Key Question: What challenge or opportunity should I prioritize to align my life with my values and aspirations?
AI Empowerment: AI helps analyze challenges and opportunities, transforming them into clear, actionable goals that align precisely with your core priorities and long-term vision.
Part 2: Tool List
- E – personal Empathy Map: Explore your thoughts, feelings, and actions to understand what drives and holds you back.
- J – Journey Mapping: Plot your past experiences to identify key turning points and transitions (Execution Guidelines)
- K – Key Milestones Analysis: Highlight critical milestones in your life to evaluate their impact and meaning.
- P – Personal Persona Map: Create a persona of yourself, including your goals, fears, and values, for a clearer self-understanding.
- Y – Your Ideal Day: Design and imagine your perfect day to clarify what brings you the most joy and fulfillment.
Part 3: Tool Guide
personal Empathy Map
- What: A Personal Empathy Map is a human-centered tool used in the Define Stage of Design Thinking for Life Design. It helps you explore your thoughts, emotions, behaviors, and external influences to clarify what drives you and what holds you back. By breaking down these elements, you can synthesize insights about your internal and external experiences, allowing you to understand your needs and priorities better. The Define Stage focuses on organizing and clarifying key insights from the previous phase, and the Personal Empathy Map connects your emotions and in-depth needs to your life and career planning goals.
- Why: In the Define Stage, the Personal Empathy Map is an essential tool for gaining self-awareness and prioritizing actions that align with your values and aspirations. It allows you to identify patterns in your thoughts and feelings, helping you frame challenges and opportunities for growth. This human-centered approach fosters self-compassion while providing a structured way to understand what motivates and limits you. By pinpointing areas of misalignment, you can create a focused direction for personal and career development.
- Tip: Divide the map into quadrants labeled “Thinking,” “Feeling,” “Doing,” and “Influences.” Be honest and specific in each section, and revisit your map regularly to track changes in your emotions and behaviors.
- AI Empowerment: AI tools can analyze your inputs about thoughts, feelings, and behaviors to identify patterns and provide insights into your motivations and limitations. NLP-powered platforms can suggest actionable strategies to address areas of misalignment and improve self-awareness.
Journey Mapping
- What: Journey Mapping is a reflective tool used in the Define Stage of Design Thinking for Life Design to plot significant events and transitions in your life. This exercise allows you to visually map your past experiences, identifying key turning points, challenges, and moments of growth. The Define Stage emphasizes synthesizing insights, and Journey Mapping helps you uncover patterns that have shaped your personal and professional identity. This tool connects your past experiences to your present goals, providing clarity on how your journey informs your future direction.
- Why: In the Define Stage, Journey Mapping is critical for understanding the emotional and personal impact of your life experiences. By reflecting on your journey, you can uncover insights into your values, motivations, and behaviors. This human-centered approach helps you identify how past challenges and successes have influenced your current aspirations and in-depth needs. The process provides clarity on the lessons you’ve learned and how they can guide your life and career planning, enabling you to move forward intentionally.
- Tip: Divide your life into stages (e.g., childhood, early career, recent years) and pinpoint key decisions or events. Reflect on the emotions and outcomes associated with each moment to uncover recurring themes or patterns.
- AI Empowerment: AI systems can help organize and visualize life events, automatically identifying patterns, recurring themes, or key transitions. Predictive analytics can suggest how past experiences might influence future decisions, offering tailored insights for growth.
Key Milestones Analysis
- What: Key Milestones Analysis is a tool in the Define Stage of Design Thinking for Life Design that helps you identify and evaluate the most significant events in your life. These milestones can include achievements, challenges, or pivotal decisions. By reflecting on their meaning and impact, you can synthesize insights about how they’ve shaped your values, emotions, and personal growth. The Define Stage focuses on clarifying patterns and priorities, and this tool enables you to connect these critical moments to your life and career goals.
- Why: In the Define Stage, analyzing your key milestones helps you better understand the emotional and personal significance of pivotal moments in your life. This human-centered tool allows you to reflect on how these events have influenced your identity, aspirations, and in-depth needs. By identifying milestones that resonate most strongly, you can gain clarity on what drives you and where you want to go. This process helps align your life and career planning with your authentic self, providing a foundation for intentional decision-making.
- Tip: For each milestone, reflect on three aspects: what happened, how it made you feel, and what lessons or values you gained from the experience. This will help you uncover the deeper meaning behind each event.
- AI Empowerment: AI-powered analysis tools can evaluate milestone data, highlighting the emotional and personal significance of pivotal moments. Machine learning algorithms can uncover trends in your achievements and challenges, helping you align them with your goals.
Personal Persona Map
- What: A Personal Persona Map is a human-centered tool in the Define Stage of Design Thinking for Life Design. It involves creating a detailed persona of yourself that includes your goals, fears, values, and motivations. By synthesizing insights from the Discover Stage, this tool helps you clarify your identity and priorities. The Define Stage emphasizes creating focus and direction, and the Personal Persona Map provides a structured way to articulate what matters most to you in both your personal and professional life.
- Why: In the Define Stage, the Personal Persona Map is essential for gaining a clear and comprehensive understanding of yourself. By organizing your goals, fears, and values into a single framework, you can identify areas of alignment and misalignment in your current life and career. This human-centered tool connects deeply with your emotions and in-depth needs, helping you frame challenges and opportunities with clarity. It fosters self-awareness and ensures that your life design is aligned with your authentic self.
- Tip: Include sections for “Goals,” “Fears,” “Values,” and “Motivations.” Be specific and honest when filling out each section, and use the map as a guide for making decisions that align with your persona.
- AI Empowerment: AI-driven platforms can synthesize data from previous stages to create a detailed, dynamic persona that evolves with your input. These tools can highlight inconsistencies between your goals, fears, and values, offering actionable recommendations for alignment.
Your Ideal Day
- What: Your Ideal Day is a visualization tool in the Define Stage of Design Thinking for Life Design that helps you imagine and design a perfect day in your life. This exercise encourages you to focus on the emotions, activities, and experiences that bring you the most joy and fulfillment. By visualizing your ideal day, you can clarify what aligns with your in-depth needs and values. The Define Stage is about synthesizing insights, and this tool helps you identify what truly matters in your daily life and career.
- Why: In the Define Stage, imagining your ideal day is a powerful way to connect with your authentic desires and aspirations. This human-centered tool allows you to explore the emotions and priorities that define a fulfilling life. By clarifying what an ideal day looks like, you can identify areas of misalignment in your current routine and make intentional changes to design a life that reflects your values. It helps you frame challenges and opportunities by focusing on what brings meaning and happiness.
- Tip: Write a detailed description of your ideal day, from morning to night, including how you feel during each activity. Use this vision as a benchmark to evaluate your current routine and identify actionable steps for alignment.
- AI Empowerment: AI visualization tools can simulate scenarios of your ideal day, providing data-driven suggestions for aligning your current routine with your vision. Emotion and activity tracking systems can offer personalized recommendations to optimize daily habits for fulfillment.
Part 4: Life Design Stories
Design Thinking has been effectively employed worldwide for career development and transition across diverse sectors. Notable figures such as Joe Gebbia in Hospitality, Jane Chan in NGOs, Kiran Sethi in Children’s Education, Paula Davis in Coaching, and Martha Moore in Apparel have leveraged this approach.
Also noteworthy is its prevalent use in Hong Kong for career progression and pivoting among individuals with varied backgrounds. In response to this, we have orchestrated a series of seminars and webinars on “Design Thinking for Life Planning and Transition,” featuring dialogue with 13 distinguished Design Thinkers from Hong Kong.
They are 吳克儉院士、林小湛教授、林偉雄院士、李潔蘭校長、鄧哲平先生、梁智軒博士、葉文謙先生、陳呂令意校長、唐文標律師、尹繼賢博士、林偉強博士、孫美妮女士 及 黎嘉豪先生 (Ordered by sequence of the interviews). We want to express our deepest gratitude to the following guest speakers for their voluntary contributions.
