Dave Evans
Co-founder of Electronic Arts, adjunct lecturer at Stanford, and co-author of Designing Your Life
Bill Burnett
Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford and co-author of Designing Your Life
Photo credit: Michael Lionstar
Bill Burnett is an award-winning Silicon Valley designer and the Executive Director of the renowned Design Program at Stanford University. He is the co-author of Designing Your Life, an empowering book that shows people of any age how to design a life in which they can thrive. A thoughtful and motivational speaker, Burnett emphasizes actionable tools in his lectures and workshops.
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About Bill Burnett
Bill Burnett’s penchant for drawing and building things began at a very early age. Today he is a very successful designer, having worked at start-ups and Fortune 500 companies, including Apple. His innovative thinking helped create award-winning products such as PowerBook laptops and the original Hasbro Star Wars action figures.
Burnett then turned his passion for design into a career as a Consulting Assistant Professor and the Executive Director of the Design Program at Stanford University. There, with his colleague Dave Evans, Burnett teaches a Life Design class that Fast Company has called “a course that’s part throwback, part foreshadowing of higher education’s future.” In thought-provoking lectures, Burnett brings the principles from this course to larger audiences—proving that the same design thinking used to create amazing technology, products, and spaces can also be used to design and build a person’s career and life.
Burnett earned his Bachelors of Science and Masters of Science in Product Design at Stanford. He holds a number of mechanical and design patents as well as design awards. In addition to his work at Stanford, he is on the Board of VOZ, a socially responsible high fashion start-up, and acts as an advisor to several other internet start-ups.
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Speaking Topics
Designing Your Life
The question “What do I want to be when I grow up?” is one that never truly goes away. Whether you are a college grad entering the workforce, a forty year-old shifting careers, or a sixty-eight year-old trying to define an encore career, the search for a fulfilling life never stops. In this riveting keynote that can be adapted to a hands-on workshop, award-winning product designer Bill Burnett teaches audiences how to look at career and life planning through the lens of design. Participants are given the tools to build their way forward and to develop various life scenarios just like a designer tests multiple prototypes. This approach fosters creativity and adaptability and allows audiences to accept that there is never just one right path.
People Management and Retention
Talent management professionals know that traditional, hierarchical relationships between employers and employees are shifting rapidly, and the future of talent retention, particularly among millennials, lies in keeping employees engaged. In this lecture, Bill Burnett helps talent management professionals become early adopters of design thinking, integrating managers’ personal development conversations with employees’ life design goals so that each employee can actively co-create his or her experience within the company.
College is over—now what?
The notion that a student’s college major will determine what they do for the rest of their life and that everyone must find their “passion” if they are to succeed are myths, or what psychologists call dysfunctional beliefs. In this thoughtful and inspiring lecture, Burnett helps college students and grads debunk these myths and understand that there is no single right path. Following the framework of design, Burnett walks audiences through the process of trying out lots of ideas, taking action and learning by doing. This is a lecture that can change a student’s life.
Topic customization for freshmen: Burnett also adapts this talk for incoming freshmen to help them learn how to design their college experience.
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Video
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Praise for Bill Burnett
. . . Bill was engaging, humorous, and fearless in taking our questions and scenarios, and also in sharing his views of other processes for attaining creativity and innovation. We put ourselves in his hands for 4 hours, and emerged more thoughtful and energized than I could have hoped for. I highly recommend engaging with Bill to get a different way of thinking about life’s important questions and a different pathway to solving them.
— PanasonicPraise for Designing Your Life
Designing Your Life walks readers through the process of building a satisfying, meaningful life by approaching the challenge the way a designer would. Experimentation. Wayfinding. Prototyping. Constant iteration. You should read the book. Everyone else will.
— Daniel Pink, bestselling author of DriveThe prototype for a happy life…Burnett and Evans show how to apply Stanford’s famous design principles to finding your place in the world, as a recent graduate or mid-career.
— NPR’s Brian LehrerLife has questions. They have answers…Learn how to find a fulfilling career…learn how to better navigate life’s big moment decisions and kill your ‘wicked problems dead.'
— The New York TimesPerhaps the book’s most important lesson is that the only failure is settling for a life that makes one unhappy. With useful fact-finding exercises, an empathetic tone, and sensible advice, this book will easily earn a place among career-finding classics
— Publishers Weekly -
Books by Bill Burnett
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Media About Bill Burnett
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and Availability
- 212 572-2013
- Bill Burnett travels from San Francisco, CA
Featured Title
Designing Your Life
“This [is] the career book of the next decade and . . . the go-to book that is read as a rite of passage whenever someone is ready to create a life they love.”—David Kelley, Founder of IDEO
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