Episode 14: What Would Make YOUR Life Better?

Before we can apply ourselves to making our lives better, we need to understand exactly what that means for us. It is likely that we'll need to look behind the simple response of 'more money' or something similar.

Until we can be specific about what a better life will look, sound and taste like, it is unlikely we'll get far in reaching it.

Transcript

Kevin: 0:07

Welcome to

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another

Kevin: 0:10

episode in this series: Make Life Better by Design. Again, I'm your host, Kevin Drayton, and I want today to do a bit of preliminary work, so to speak, on this matter of making life better because really, to take advantage of this business of making choices and taking decisions, you really need to understand what it is that will actually make your life better. Now, a lot of people would probably say, well, a load of money, but actually is that it in most cases? Because I think that really it's more the idea of what they could do with the money rather than the money per se. So what precisely? Big things? Small things? It's important to understand exactly what it is that is gonna make your life better. Now let's, let's, um, take an example that I've always liked from the musical Fiddler on the Roof. Where the character sings his song, If I Were a Rich Man. cause that really is, is what it is for him. It's being rich. And then he, he fantasizes about what he could do with this wealth and, uh, in his, in his house, which is obviously gonna be very opulent. He's looking to build one long staircase just going up and one even longer coming down and one more leading nowhere just for show. And will it really make his life better to have these multiple staircases? Hmm, I'm not so sure. So to take action that will result in a better life for you, we need to look behind our first and probably nearly impossible wishes and see just how far we think we could get to making our life better in that direction. Now design, uh, can't achieve miracles, but it can achieve change, which I think is, is probably when we want to make life better, is what we're looking for. We're looking for change. And of course, the bit that many of us dislike, is the need to take action for that to happen. A designer, IE, a professional designer with a capital D can't make your life better unless you develop and deploy your own skills as a designer, small d. So that you can really understand what these professional designers are, are offering and evaluating what the chances are of making those products, that work, better for your life. Now my wife often tells me to stop talking in abstract terms and use concrete examples. So here we go. When I was young, I dreaded going to the dentist so logically, therefore, my life would be better if I didn't go. At least that's what my young self thought at the time. And I deployed all sorts of tactics to avoid going. I suffered toothache and I kept completely quiet about it. Oh, it was any signal that there might be something wrong with my teeth, uh, I had to camouflage and make sure it didn't get through to my parents. But as you know, that actually of course made my life worse, and by the time I plucked up courage to go to the dentist again many years later, boy did I need treatment. A lot of treatment. During the course of that treatment, I learned a lot about dental hygiene and I also learned a lot about what my, not just oral, but general medical health might be in the future if I didn't get my finger out and change my ways. Take some action. At the time, I was a good boy. I was brushing twice a day with an ordinary manual toothbrush. Not good enough. It wasn't doing the job. Okay. Next step. I started using floss, definitely better, but I was given to understand. In no short measure that I needed more. So I was introduced to interdental brushes and I have to say the results were much better. Oral hygiene certainly improved, although of course it's no good just buying them. You have to use them. And then the big one, an electric toothbrush. My word, huge step up. Certainly for me. However, I, I quickly learned that not all electric toothbrushes are created equal, ultimately, my best dental hygiene, uh, regime now involves a combination of an ultrasonic toothbrush together with a, what I'll call standard electric one. I need to make sure they have the right brush heads.'cause there's soft, there's hard, there's round, there's long and all sorts, and they've gotta be changed at the correct intervals. So you have a complete range of interdental brushes of different sizes for different gaps in the teeth. And there are straight ones and there are angled ones. And of course you've got to have a toothpaste that does the right job. It uh, it needs to have fluoride, so I'm advised and I like one that has a decent taste and ultimately, leaves my mouth when I've finished all this faffing about, uh, with the feeling that, you know, a good cleaning team's been in and, uh, and given the whole mouth a thorough valet. There, there's more. But I think by now you've got the picture. Now that could be regarded as obsessive. But that's just how much I don't want to get drilled or worse sitting in a dentist's chair if I can do anything about it. And that has undoubtedly made my life better. I am no longer terrified of the idea of the dentist and I have better oral hygiene and better oral hygiene means better health. Generally, everything's connected. The knee bone connects to the shin bone and mind, body and mouth all have a very intimate relationship. I've got other examples of, uh, how I've made my life better as far as I'm concerned, using design'cause that's what I think was happening in that example. But I'd love to hear about how other people think they've made their lives better, uh, through that sort of process. The involvement and tenacity that's needed to make the most of what design can offer us: it probably just doesn't seem worthwhile to many people, but I think that once we get a glimpse of what is on offer, what's possible behind the rather dull, drab, pedestrian, what I think of as a default life, uh, that is what constitutes day to day for much of the population. Once you've discovered that, it's pretty near impossible to go back and ignore it. So the other aspect of this for me is a matter of scale. That it's possible to consider making our lives better on all sorts of scales. Tiny, tiny things that can make life better. Huge things, major changes. And those major changes may involve, uh, working with other people. I'm not advocating one level or the other, but the more you think about it, the more you realize that it's only through change, that things probably will get better. And if that level of change required is beyond your individual ability, then we need to get together, find common cause, and do something about it. Bit of a lighter note. A character in that absolute masterpiece by Douglas Adams: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a character called Slartbartfast. Wonderful at names was Douglas and Slartibartfast was apparently a Magrathean planetary designer with a capital D. That's what he did for a living. And as a planetary designer, he had a, a specialism. Uh, he wasn't just a pastry chef. He, he, he had a party piece, whether it was eclair or whatever. But anyway, in planetary design, Slartibartfast's speciality was fjords. And he, and he claims in, in the book that he actually won an award for designing Norway with all its fjords. And he says, um, I think fjords give a lovely baroque feel to a continent. Well, obviously, uh, that's a long way uh, in the opposite direction from the little job of making my oral hygiene life a bit better. But it shows, uh, we don't have to limit ourselves to thinking about small things. There's a lot of scope for making life better. And professional Designers have probably devoted time to ways in which that might happen, but you've gotta seek it out and you've gotta take some action. You might get it wrong first time or times. Persevere. The cumulative effect of making life better at these different levels can make a huge difference to your quality of life. So it's only when we can fully understand in detail what it is that's gonna make our lives better that we can really make a start on the job. Then we can design our way to solutions. For limited time, you are eligible for a three month free trial renewing five. You may hear in the background that my little friend is telling me about some special offer I can get from, from Amazon. This is the sort of thing that happens to me with podcasting. Ah, well, if you have been, thank you very much for listening. Next time we're going to be meeting some new people who have a different perspective on making life better by design, and I hope that you will seek that out and give it a listen. Until then, design well. We'll speak next time. Bye for now.