Design Your Career: Bring More of Yourself Into the Future (298)

10 June 2025

Dr Sebastian Kernbach

It is not easy to know what we want. We are confronted with many options to choose from, we have (our own) beliefs and wish to reduce our risks when making decisions. This is when life design comes in. Life design is the application of design thinking to our career and life beyond work. We will use creativity to uncover our dysfunctional beliefs and to design our way forward and help answer the questions below.
What does "good work" mean for you? A job with a social standing and a high salary? Or, one which allows for self-realisation, to move something, to create meaning, to shape the future and accelerate your personal development? Are you looking for a change but wonder where to start? Do you find yourself in a hamster wheel and would like to find ways to get away from it? Or are you quite happy but wonder what else is out there? And because happiness and fulfilment isn't only limited to your spare time, there is no need to distinguish between "work" and "life": lifetime is worktime multiplied by joy.

This workshop uses design thinking to address demands of "new work". Together with other researchers, you develop a constructive and effective approach to finding and designing your vocation at the University or elsewhere by developing new thinking patterns and working on your future ideas.
We start off with analysing what brought you where you are today through activating and reflective visual methods. This understanding will be the foundation for defining your current challenges and ideate possible solutions using visual thinking and incorporating peer coaching. The next stage, prototyping and testing, will make you turn your thoughts into action and will aggregate your efforts during the workshop. By the end of the workshop, you will be able to apply your learning and ideas into real life. With this approach, you can iteratively design your way forward to a more fulfilling and meaningful life.

Learning Outcomes :

After the workshop, you will:
• understand your needs for a life that offers joy and fulfilment
• have already created many job ideas that match your needs
• have already taken steps to pursue some of your ideas
• know what steps to take to realize a flourishing life
• adopt habits of prototyping and iterating to your vocation and take action instead of over-thinking.

ONLINE!

Date: Tuesday 10 June 2025

Time: From 9:15 am to 5:15 pm

Location: Online !

Trainer:

Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kernbach is Assistant-Professor at the University of St. Gallen, a Visiting Fellow at Stanford University and Guest Professor at the African Doctoral Academy at Stellenbosch University . He is the founder of the Visual Collaboration Lab (vicola.org) and the Life Design Lab in Switzerland (www.lifedesignlab.ch).

His activities in research, teaching and consulting focus on the role of visual thinking and design thinking to support individuals, teams and organizations in their thinking and communication efforts, in particular knowledge workers, such as researchers, lecturers, consultants, coaches, etc. His seminars and lecturers at Bachelor, Master, MBA, PhD, and Executive level are highly interactive and set doing and action at the core of participants' learning experience.

His latest book in English is "Creativity in Research – Cultivate clarity, be innovative and make progress in your research journey" with Cambridge University Press. It is based on the work of the Stanford team "Research as Design" of which Prof. Dr. Sebastian Kernbach is a team member of: www.CreativityInResearch.org.

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