How Design Thinking Could Make Your New Year's Resolutions Stick

Introducing Design for Living, an advice column in which we apply design thinking to everyday problems. In the debut column, Clear app designer Phill Ryu tackles New Year's resolutions.

If design isn't just "how it looks, but how it works," then we should be able to apply it anywhere--even to the mundane but important problems that come up in the course of living our everyday lives. As Charles Eames once cheekily put it: "I have never been forced to accept compromises, but I have willingly accepted constraints." He wasn't just talking about the design of a chair or a film. Exercising creativity while accepting constraints to enable meaningful outcomes--and zeroing in on the constraints that matter, while avoiding getting trapped in ones that don't--is the essence of design, and, it could be argued, living well.

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