DESIGNING YOUR FAMILY LIFE

Follow your passion, don’t take your eye off the ball, climb the ladder.  From earliest days our hopes and dreams for our children often rest on dysfunctional thinking. For most, finding a passion and a career is not a linear journey. Dave Evans, co-founder of Stanford’s Life Design Lab, and Kathy Davies, its managing director, will guide parents through the design thinking process to solve our way forward with our pre-college kids.  Evans and Davies will share how to apply design thinking strategies to help students reframe thinking, problem solve like designers and apply these strategies to planning college (and beyond). They will lead parents through two key exercises that focus on helping pre-college students curate curiosity and become wayfinders, so our kids  can begin to design a future that aligns with who they are and carve a path in a changing and uncertain world.

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About Our Speakers

Dave Evans has a long history in innovation. At Apple, he led the first mouse team and introduced laser printing to consumers.  As a co-founder of Electronic Arts, he was the company’s first VP of Talent and as a management consultant he assisted startups and multi-nationals in strategy, marketing, and corporate culture formation.  Along the way, Dave discovered his real passion is to help people discern and build the life they really want, which led him to co-found the Stanford Life Design Lab with Bill Burnett in 2007 with the mission of applying the innovation principles of design thinking to the wicked problem of designing your life.  The Life Design Lab has thrived at Stanford and is now expanding broadly across higher education globally.  Bill and Dave's book, Designing Your Life, How to Build a Well-Lived and Joyful Life, is a New York Times #1 bestseller, available in 23 languages worldwide.

Kathy Davies is an engineer and the Managing Director of the Stanford Life Design Lab, leading a team of Fellows who teach the popular courses Designing Your Life, Designing Your Stanford and Designing the Professional to hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students each year. Kathy began at Stanford teaching Product Design and later became a full time Lecturer in Mechanical Engineering and a Fellow at the Life Design Lab. Kathy spent the first 20 years of her career leading technical teams on such diverse products as the world’s first Internet Radio and heart surgery tools. Her ideation and technical problem solving chops earned her 5 patents. Her DYL team has trained 150 universities globally to use the life design processes.  Kathy founded and leads DYL Consulting, and beyond Stanford consults with universities and tech companies to bring product design tools and life design practices to their teams.