Designing Meaning Into Work Habits & Routines

We spend one-third of our lives at work. And work as we know it is changing. Millennials and Gen Z’ers are demanding flexible, and autonomous work as a core tenet of their jobs. Policymakers are exploring policies to make work better -- like incentivizing companies to be Worker Friendly.

This class takes a design approach to these tensions and visions of better work, asking how might we get more intentional about our work-life -- and what might make it better?

We will focus in particular on how we might remake the everyday challenges within our work-lives. Our work-day may be composed of a bundle of routines that give us comfort and stability, but they can also make us feel stagnated and bored -- or stressed and burnt-out.

In this class, we will redesign routines and rituals in different workplaces, from hospitals to universities. Student teams will uncover the work-life challenges in these different environments, and focus in on how to make better experiences that carry more meaning to employees. This could mean focusing on changing personal behavior, building stronger community connections, connecting to values-driven missions, or improving everyday routines.

We will use ritual design* as our framework to design rich experiences around two Stanford contexts: your student life experience, and Stanford Medicine care teams’ work-life experience. For the first context, you will take your existing routines, discover new meaning(s), and infuse ritual moments. Each of you will develop and create your own ritual. In the second context, you will work with a specific care team at Stanford Medicine. You will partner with the care team members, discover new meaning(s), and design new rituals for their teams.

While building on the key design abilities(moving between abstract and concrete, navigating ambiguity), in this class the focus will be on developing strong behavior design skills and using advanced tools such as journey mapping, ritual canvas, improv, experience prototyping, and video sketching. This class is for you if you want to work on wellbeing challenges in the behavior design space, or if you want to improve your leadership skills to better navigate teams and org design challenges.

*What’s ritual design? Ritual design is a distinct approach to behavior design. It complements behavioral models and mechanics with its focus on beliefs, myths, values, and meaning-making in shifting human behavior. Check out our website www.ritualdesignlab.org.

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