RMV 20 Barbara Knickerbocker Beskind: You Can Design Aging

Barbara has been designing her life for almost a century, with a stint at global design firm IDEO starting when she was just 93-years-old. After seeing founder David Kelley featured on an episode of 60 Minutes, Barbara wrote to the company offering to help design for aging and low-vision populations. Hailing from the field of occupational therapy, after training through the U.S. Army’s War Emergency Course, and serving for 20 years before retiring as a major in 1966, Barbara’s own experience with macular degeneration led her to design glasses to help her and others with the condition. 

In this episode of Results May Vary, Barbara shares her fascinating story of personal reinvention, and how rather than allowing her illnesses and advanced age to hold her back, she simply used them as new constraints to redesign her life around.

RMV 2 David Kelley: You Can Design For Creative Confidence

Today we want to introduce you to one of the most influential people on the planet when it comes to design, innovation, and creativity. Founder of IDEO and the Hasso Platner Institute of Design at Stanford (The d.school), David Kelley has spent decades helping students, employees, and organizations apply unleash the creativity that lies within each and every one of us.

We thought, if there was one person most qualified to give advice on how you can design your life, it would be David.

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Show Notes:

Creative Confidence A powerful and compelling book by David and Tom Kelley on unleashing the creative potential within us all.

Stanford d.school The Hasso Platner Institute of Design brings students and faculty from radically different backgrounds together to develop innovative, human-centered solutions to real-world challenges. The transformative experiences of students and faculty have fueled the d.school’s explosive growth.

IDEO An award-winning global design firm that takes a human-centered, design-based approach to helping organizations in the public and private sectors innovate and grow.

Albert Bandura Psychologist known as the originator of social learning theory and the theoretical construct of self-efficacy, and is also responsible for the influential 1961 Bobo doll experiment. 

Mindfulness Popularized by Jon Kabat-Zinn. Maintaining a moment-by-moment awareness of our thoughts, feelings, bodily sensations, and surrounding environment.

Mind Mapping David Kelley uses mind maps to foster creativity. "Mind maps are organic and allow me to free associate. They are great for asking questions and revealing connections between seemingly unrelated ideas. The cool thing is that you allow yourself to follow your inner thoughts, which is different than making a list where you are trying to be complete and deal with data."