DYL Week One: The Wee Goal of Living Perfectly

DESCRIPTION

The course uses design thinking to address the “wicked problem” of designing your life and career. Offering a framework, tools, space and a community of peers and mentor. The course employs a design thinking approach including empathizing, defining challenges, ideating, prototyping, discussion, reflection, revising  to help students from any major develop a constructive and effective approach to finding and designing their lives and vocations during and after their time at UNCSA. Topics include the integration of work and worldviews, ideation & prototyping techniques, designing work/life balance, and methods of critique.  

SLO’s

• Understand Design Thinking practices and how DT differs from other thinking

• Design a plan that will guide your academic decision-making

• Articulate a life vision

• Identify what next actions move them toward that vision 

Charles Wilson Peale(1741-1827), Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790), 1789

Prompt 1: Name two “Virtues with their precepts” that you would like to perfect– they can be Mr. Franklin’s Virtues or your own choices.

Ben Franklin- seal 

Ben Franklin, “Plan”    

Prompt 2: Study Franklin’s day plan. Make your own day plan– whether for next week, or for the plan that you hope you’ll be living in 2031 or 2036– or take a slightly ironic approach and create an overly-ambitious daily schedule.              

Benjamin West, Ratification Day (January 14, 1783), 1783

Benjamin West, Benjamin Franklin Drawing electricity from the Sky, 1816 13x 10

                         

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., speaking to students at Barratt Junior High School in Philadelphia on October 26, 1967,

where he delivered his speech "What Is Your Life's Blueprint?" W

e will view together minutes 3:00-5:56    and minutes 7:22-9:00. 15:20-17

In your blueprint for your life, would you/how would you like to define/include plans for your own:

• dignity
• worth
• somebodiness
• determination to achieve excellence in your various fields of endeavor
• what your life's work will be
• is this the same as your job?

Journaling: Franklin, MLK, Jr, Feynman:

• What sticks? What will you hold on to from Franklin, MLK, Jr?
• describe your understanding of the need to commit to the eternal principles of
• beauty
• love, &
• justice
• What aspects of the blueprint of your life do you want to make very clear?
• How clearly do you want to lay out your goals for the next 4-8 years?

ShiftQuest brainstorming

What are your aspirations for this class?

Responding to the practical. In the aspirations sshared last year, I captured the following statements, andgrouped them in two chunks. First, ones that I planned around: 

• find ways to better self without being obsessive anad self-critical
• how to apply creative mindset to everything I do.... so everything supports my future and self as an artist
• establishing the plan to accomplish the life i want: to be happy, and what practical steps can i take to establish that map. 
• get a better picture of the next two years after graduation-- clearly define the career i want to build. bridge gap between ideation and execution

Second, one's you asked for that were implied in my plan but not explicit. I'm now weaving them into the weekly schedule explicitly, starting today. 

• feel better about graduating moving on and forward-- gain confidence in grappling with challenging life decision moments
• finding out how to better organize my life and keep it together
• what tools, systems of organization will we use/learn about
• improving self-discipline -- a different vision of my life every week that would be realistic and what steps would start it

Conclusions feom DYL Round 1

Moment

For Next Time (Monday, August 31), Excerpts from Walden, byessayist, poet, philosopher, naturalist and proto-environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (b.1817-d.1864).