How to Use ~Design Thinking~ to Plan Your Best Summer Yet
Featuring inspiration from the ultimate summer fever dream: HBO’s GIRLS.
We’ve made it to May and tbh it feels more like the start of a new year than January did. Naturally, I’m contemplating the unconscious architecture of my life. I’m also reading “Designing Your Life” and realizing I’ve been designing my life all along (kinda), especially when it comes to summer. I’m not talking about having a cute, curated IG grid kind of life design. I mean the natural response I seem to have to the complex interplay of my personal boredom, avoidance, and insatiable curiosity about the world and my place in it.
Youthful Summers as a Prototype
My father, a teacher (and a Virgo, which explains so much), constructed our summers with the precision of an architect and the spirit of a dance mom. While other kids cannonballed into the formlessness of suburban vacation, my brother and I were participants in an ongoing educational experiment. We’d orbit his summer classes or attend our own. I’d sneak off to the library for sacred internet time (RIP Avatar High on the N dot com) before heading home.
But these summers didn’t feel like school. The energy was different. Electric. Chlorine-laced. Whether it was voluntarily enrolling in math class (go ahead, roast me), facing the vast unknown of the pool’s high dive, or channeling my inner McEnroe at tennis camp, I felt engaged af. The dopamine-satisfying cocktail of structure and spontaneity lit me up. The mundane became magical through curiosity and temporary commitment.
In college, that instinct evolved. One year, I stayed on campus immersed in design theory coursework and the sweet relief of free A/C. Another summer, I moved to Minneapolis because I was obsessed with the Walker Art Center and dreamed of applying for their design fellowship. I ended up interning with a former Fellow, working on a book for Brian Eno—and the experience scratched the itch so fully, I never even applied.
Each summer felt like a fractal: a mini life contained inside the larger Big Life™ (as my bestie and I affectionately call it). Portals to alternate realities. Bite-sized opportunities to explore the many versions of who I could become. And looking back, the design of an intentional summer is what makes the memories stick.
Designing a New Season
Even now, in the supposed stability of adulthood, that rhythm persists. As the seasons change, so too does some aspect of my life. Not because the current version is fundamentally flawed—but because I crave the freshness that comes with intentional change, even within the comforting confines of routine.
There’s always space to pivot, return, or start anew—be it through a dramatic haircut (s/o to last year’s big shave) or a renewed commitment to learning how to kickflip (subtle foreshadowing?)
This year, I’m embracing that instinct with a kind of fervor that might seem out of place in an age of cynicism. I’m employing design thinking in earnest. Sure, it’s buzzy in tech bro and agency circles. But in this context? It feels… liberating. Kind of fun. Like a gentle act of rebellion against the passive consumption of time. A framework for formalizing a personal fuck-around-and-find-out.
Why Now?
Because my relationship with New York summers is complicated, okay!? The memory of sweating through my clothes while waiting for the G en route to my Baggu internship was tolerable in 2013, and only 2013. It was a different era—I lived in a parallel timeline to the cast of GIRLS, back when there were still more fixies than Ubers and cold brew didn’t cost fifty dollars (or spike my cortisol). Things have shifted and I’ve become more attuned to the ways my environment impacts my nervous system.
Last year, I spent three weeks away, hiking through Banff, Washington, and Oregon (what can I say, I love to hike). I felt more grounded than I had in months. This year, I want to stretch that three weeks away into three months. Not as an escape, but as a prototype—a beta test of an alternate reality where humidity isn’t my sworn enemy and I’m touching a lot of grass that isn’t at Domino Park.
I’m still figuring it out: what problems I’m reframing, what exactly I want to prototype. But the framework is guiding me in a way that feels creative.
If you’re also feeling restless—yearning for space, curiosity, or novelty—maybe you’re ready to design your summer too.
How to Design Your Summer
(Designing Your Life 🤝 HBO’s GIRLS)
1. Start with Curiosity
Establish the wayfinding. Ask: What am I drawn to right now? What sounds energizing? Even if it makes absolutely no sense to your rational mind. Opium or no opium.
Season 1, Episode 1 — Pilot
Hannah tells her parents:
“I think I may be the voice of my generation. Or at least a voice. Of a generation.”
Delusional? Maybe. But it’s the rawest expression of curiosity-as-compass.
2. Reframe the Problem
How can you make your existential crisis sound like a TED Talk? Instead of Where should I go this summer? ask: What kind of life do I want to test without fully committing to a complete identity overhaul?
Season 1, Episode 1 — Pilot
Hannah, freshly cut off by her parents, approaches her boss at her unpaid internship:
“My circumstances have changed, and I can no longer afford to work for free.”
A flawless reframe in response to a gravity problem.
In Designing Your Life, a gravity problem is something you can't change: like, say, your parents suddenly cutting you off financially. Or, in Hannah’s case, that her unpaid internship was never going to magically become paid. That’s the reality. You can’t negotiate with gravity. You can, however, reframe your situation into a design problem, something you can work with.
3. Prototype
Try small experiments! Don’t overcommit. Try a micro-version. Treat your curiosity like a hypothesis, not a full-blown lifestyle rebrand.
Season 2, Episode 8 — It’s Back
Marnie sings Stronger at Charlie’s party. Completely unhinged. Utterly earnest. A pop star prototype no one asked for. She tested out a new identity in real time. It flops. But that’s the point!
4. Track the Data
AKA energy mapping. Ask: What gave me energy? What drained me? What surprised me? Did that feel amazing or ruin my life? Not everything that looks dreamy on paper works IRL.
Season 2, Episode 10 — Together
Hannah stays in bed with a Q-tip stuck in her ear, spiraling. She’s alone, off her meds, creatively paralyzed, and refusing help. It starts as solitude, maybe even self-protection. But it slowly morphs into full collapse. This isn’t her romantic ideal of the struggling writer. It’s just her and her untreated OCD. A brutal but necessary lesson: freedom without structure can quietly wreck you.
Season 2, Episode 5 — One Man’s Trash
Hannah slips into a 48-hour fantasy life with a handsome doctor with a beautiful Brooklyn brownstone. It’s dreamlike, until suddenly it isn’t. The data? Comfort doesn’t equal compatibility. And sometimes, fantasy only works when it’s fleeting. Even when someone offers you safety, it doesn’t mean you’re ready to receive it.
5. Iterate
Don’t wait for perfect. Design thinking isn’t about being right. It’s about adjusting in real time, shame-free.
Season 5, Episode 6 — The Panic in Central Park
Marnie ditches her Desi life for one chaotic, nostalgic day with her ex Charlie. It's romantic, unsettling, and a little tragic. She spends the night trying to make it feel like a new beginning.
The next episode? She leaves Desi.
“I can't go back to who I was. That girl is gone.”
Iteration means letting the moment teach you something— even if it’s not the lesson you wanted. It doesn’t have to be logical. It just has to be true.
Your Turn
If you designed your summer around what you’re curious about, instead of what you “should” do, what might shift?
Try this…
Something I want to feel: _______
Something I want to try: _______
Something I want to test: _______
Something I want to track: _______
You don’t need a five-step plan to change your life. You just need one season. One question. One sliver of Marnie willingness to go off-script (or cover Stronger if that’s what you’re feeling pulled to).
Let summer be a prototype!
Happy designing <3
Love this Erica