From chaos to balance: My journey to designing a life by design

For a long time, I felt like my days were slipping through my fingers. I’d wake up, open my emails, spend the entire day reacting to the demands of others, and collapse in the evening exhausted, yet nowhere near accomplishing the things that actually mattered to me.

Category:

Speculative Design

Author:

Pavel Danyi

Read:

11 mins

Location:

Prague

Date:

July 21, 2025

During a university course on the "Future of Work," I finally confronted the question that had been nagging me: Why do I live so reactively instead of intentionally? Is there a structured way to find balance and direction?

In a casual conversation with my classmate Lucie Z., a fellow information designer, we admitted we weren't alone in this. Many of us in the millennial generation are balancing on a tightrope between burnout, chaos, and the sinking feeling that we are missing out on something vital. That moment led us to a pivotal idea: What if we approached our lives as a design problem?

Instead of reaching for another generic self-help article or a time-management app, I turned to the book "Designing Your Life" by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. I was intrigued because it didn’t offer platitudes like "find your passion." Instead, it offered concrete methods to stop, map out what works, and—most importantly—try things differently. I didn't expect miracles, but I hoped for a new perspective. And that is exactly what I got.

Here is how I proceeded using the design thinking approach.

1. The Life Dashboard

The first method I used was the Life Dashboard. It is a simple, visual way to gauge how you feel about different areas of your life. I evaluated four core categories: Work, Play, Love, and Health. I assigned each area a score from 1 to 10 based on how fulfilled I felt.

The data offered a surprisingly honest mirror.

Work (8/10): This scored the highest. It reflected my dedication and the fact that I genuinely enjoy my work in UX design. However, I also felt that it was becoming overwhelming and I was losing perspective.

Play (5/10): I realised I had indefinitely postponed creative activities—working on my portfolio, design challenges, or simply walking outside.

Health (5/10): I knew what I should be doing, but practice lagged behind theory. Movement and quality sleep had been relegated to the back burner.

Love (4/10): I was in a "single mode," with most contacts happening online. It wasn't a crisis, but it certainly wasn't growth. It was stagnation.

This phase wasn't just about numbers; it was about stopping to reflect. The dashboard provided a clear map of where I was and what needed my attention most.

2. Work View vs. Life View

The next method from the book involves reflecting separately on your Work View and your life view, and then seeing where they intersect—or clash.

I wrote two short manifestos and answered three reflective questions about how they complement or contradict one another.

My Reflection: I realised I love my work when it has a positive impact—helping others or advancing the world through service design or research. However, my work has a tendency to breach its boundaries and colonise my personal space. When that happens, I lose energy.

The Conflict: My life view reminded me that I don't want life to be solely about performance. I need space for stillness, for moments without an agenda.

The takeaway was clear: When I let work dominate, my life narrows. But when I consciously seek balance and listen to my body and mind, I am better able to define what "good work" actually means. These two views are interconnected; one cannot grow without the other.

3. The Good Time Journal

The third tool was the Good Time Journal. This method goes deeper than the dashboard, tracking daily activities based on two parameters: Engagement (Flow) and Energy (does this activity drain me or fill me up?).

I kept this log for three weeks.

The Findings: I noticed that creative activities—like morning sketching or finishing a research segment—put me into a state of flow and energized me. Conversely, reactive tasks like answering emails or fixing organizational snags drained me with zero added value.

The Pattern: My days lacked the variety I craved, often slipping into stereotypes. However, visualizing this allowed me to redesign my weeks. I began to consciously schedule "recharging" activities and limit the energy vampires

4. Mind Maps

Using the data from my Good Time Journal, I moved to Mind Mapping. I selected three areas where I felt most engaged: Travel, Friendship, and Respect.

From these maps, I extracted key values:

Travel: Experience, Freedom, Discovery.
Friendship: Trust, Understanding, Love.
Respect: Research, Respect, Design.

Based on these, I brainstormed three hypothetical roles:

Field Researcher/Sociologist: Combining travel, discovery, and freedom.
Social Service Worker: Combining trust, empathy, and connection.
Service Designer/Researcher: Combining respect, research, and design.

This was a "mental warm-up." It wasn't about picking a job immediately but connecting my intuition with concrete ideas to encourage experimentation.

What is Speculative Design? (From an IKEA Catalog to a Marketplace Ad)

The brief wasn't simply "create an illustration." My task was to apply the method of speculative design. The goal of this method isn't to predict the future, but to materialise possible scenarios – often controversial ones – so we can discuss them before they become reality.

In the course of our collaboration, I generated dozens of different variants and artifacts, from wearables to digital services. For the purpose of this article, however, I will focus on one specific concept that elicited the strongest reactions – the PulseNest.

Roman Sellner and Natálie Káčová provided me with a scenario of the world in 2050, where technology in the care of grieving parents is a common commodity. My task was to create a believable ecosystem for this world. It wasn't enough to just create a product. I had to show its entire life cycle: how it is sold, how it is reported in the news, and what happens to it when no one wants it anymore.

The power of speculative design lies in its banality. If the artifacts looked like props from Black Mirror, the viewer could easily dismiss them as unrealistic. But if they look like something that pops up in your morning news feed or on Facebook, the defense mechanisms crumble, and a sense of chilling unease sets in.

Phase 1: The Commodification of Grief (The Catalog)

The first step was to create a product that promises comfort. I placed the PulseNest artifact within the aesthetic of a department store catalog.

Fig. 1: PulseNest in the aesthetic of a global retail chain. The visual combines a homely atmosphere with a technological description of a product that "plays back the actual heart rhythm and breath of your child." The £990 price tag adds a terrifying reality – grief becomes an item in a shopping cart.

Phase 2: Institutionalization (News 2050)

For the world to be believable, society must react to technology. Therefore, I created a fictional article from the iDNES.cz news server dated 2050.

Fig. 2: Fictional article "PulseNest Enters Czech Hospitals." The text simulates public debate – quoting enthusiastic ministry spokespeople as well as skeptical psychologists warning against "pathological mourning." This artifact demonstrates how such technology would be normalized in the public space.

Phase 3: Waste and Forgetting (Marketplace)

The most chilling part of my work was the visual showing the end of the product's life cycle. What happens to a pillow that simulates the heartbeat of a dead child when the parents no longer want it?

Fig. 3: Ad on Facebook Marketplace. The text "Selling our PulseNest, we no longer need it" for 5,000 CZK is a brutal collision of sacred grief and banal consumerism. It shows the moment when a "tool of love" becomes "used goods" that need to be discarded.

Methodology: battling AI and finding "The Uncanny"

Although the result may look simple, the path to it was long. My main tool was generative artificial intelligence (Perplexity for context, ChatGPT/DALL-E 3 and Gemini for visuals), but it wasn't a "one-click" job.

It was more of a battle with the algorithm. I generated hundreds of variants and variations, testing different styles and compositions. AI tends to generate "pretty" and "happy" people from stock photos. My task was to force it to generate an emotion that is much more complex: a mixture of hope, pain, and shame.

Case study: The evolution of a prompt

What does the search for the right expression look like for a mother using such a product? Here is an example of how I had to iterate the assignment (prompt) to get from kitsch to something that works.

Attempt No. 1 (Failure): Prompt: "Sad mother looking at a computer screen with an avatar of a child, futuristic style, blue light." Result: Too theatrical, too "cinematic." The character was looking directly at the viewer, which felt like a cry for help. It lacked intimacy and believability.

Attempt No. X (Dead End): Prompt: "Product photography, realistic lifestyle shot. A woman sitting at a kitchen table. Looking at a tablet. Warm lighting." Result: Too cozy. It looked like an advertisement for video calls. The uncomfortable ethical contradiction was missing.

Attempt No. 42 (Final Version): Prompt: "Cinematic shot, hyper-realistic. Over-the-shoulder view of a tired woman looking at a tablet screen. The woman is NOT looking at the camera; she is avoiding eye contact, looking down, expression is a mix of comfort and deep shame. Soft, cold morning light. Commercial aesthetic but with a dystopian undertone." Result: Only here did I manage to hit the key emotion – shame. The woman avoids eye contact because she knows what she is doing is socially unacceptable, but she can't help herself. It was this detail, fought for through dozens of attempts, that gave the artifact its believability.

Impact: When Design Causes Terror

Since I was working remotely, I had no direct contact with the workshop participants (healthcare professionals and experts). I often doubted whether mere pixels sent over the internet carried any weight. The true impact of this method only hit me when listening to the podcast Ministerský jednorožec (The Ministerial Unicorn), where psychotherapist Kateřina Hájková Klíčová reflected on the participants' reactions to these very visuals.

The artifacts worked exactly according to the definition of speculative design – they induced an "ethical shock." Participants did not react to the aesthetics, but to the terrifying availability of these technologies. As stated in the podcast:

"I see terror in your eyes. Speculative design can do that. [...] Only when we go through that shock can we then ask: What will we, as humans, do about it?" [^1]

When the healthcare professionals saw the catalog with the PulseNest pillow, their first reaction was rejection: "We don't want this, let's go back to bonfires." And that was exactly the goal. Thanks to these artifacts, they were able to experience a "dry run" of a situation where a parent comes to them requesting such technology. We created a safe simulator for dilemmas that await us.

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