“Life Design”
“Life Design”
The Omnivorous Logic of Business Innovation
This chapter looks at the migration of norms and practices of business innovation outside the business world as a consequence of their rising prestige. It provides an in-depth analysis of “life-design,” a set of commercially successful strategies developed by Silicon Valley innovators to help individuals “innovate” their lives and thereby achieve happiness. The chapter argues that the same modern-Romantic notions of the self that provided consultants with a model of creative potentiality and the cultural conditions of possibility for developing design thinking strategies for innovating technologies are now ironically being transformed as a result of the fact that the self has become the subject of those strategies as if it were a technology in need of innovation. The chapter unpacks what reflexivity means for the self as technology, what constitutes a well-designed life, what prototyping potential future lives entails, how the ideals of speed and instantaneity that suffuse business innovation affect notions of self-transformation when one’s life is approached as an object of innovation, what the presentation of self in the quest for a well-designed life means when it is the object of brainstorming sessions, and what socioeconomic conditions of possibility enable such a method of “self-innovation,” to begin with.
Keywords: life-design, design thinking, technology, self-transformation, happiness, Silicon Valley, self-innovation, prototyping, brainstorming
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