When I first encountered design thinking as a graduate student at Stanford, it was framed as a process for innovation. What I didn’t realize then was that those same principles could also be a map for living—and for healing.
Designing for Life and Death
In 2007, my team was challenged to design a baby incubator that cost less than 1% of traditional models. We learned that millions of premature babies die each year from hypothermia—and that expensive hospital incubators simply weren’t accessible to most families in developing countries.
So we began, as design thinking teaches, with empathy. We traveled to villages across India, listening to mothers, nurses, and doctors. They told us about unreliable electricity, multi-day journeys to hospitals, and prohibitive costs.
Through countless rounds of ideation and prototyping, we created the Embrace portable incubator —a low-cost solution that keeps babies warm without continuous power. To date, it’s helped save over a million newborns in more than 25 countries, including in humanitarian crises from Syria to Ukraine.
Designing My Own Life
Ten years into my journey, Embrace nearly collapsed–and I did too. I was burned out. Untethered. Heartbroken. I had lost not just the mission, but the identity I had built my life around.
That’s when I picked up Designing Your Life —and realized I could apply the same principles I had once used to build a product toward rebuilding myself. I turned the design process inward.
- Empathize:I stopped dismissing my feelings and began listening to what my body and heart truly needed.
- Be honest: I faced the truth—growing up in a home with domestic violence had fueled my drive to help the most vulnerable, but it had come at the cost of myself.
- Define: I wanted to heal what I’d been running from and finally feel whole.
- Ideate: I experimented with every healing modality—Internal Family Systems therapy, meditation retreats, psychedelic journeys, frog poison. I worked with trauma experts like Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score)
- Prototype & Test: I treated healing like design: try, learn, iterate.
- Mind the process: I stopped chasing outcomes and focused on presence, compassion, and connection.
The same process I once used to save newborns ultimately saved me. By turning that lens inward, I learned deep self-compassion and began to understand who I was beyond my work, my purpose, or any external marker of success. As AI reshapes the nature of work, I believe we’re all being called to reimagine what truly matters—to see ourselves not just for what we do, but for who we are underneath it all..
This journey is at the heart of my upcoming memoir, Like a Wave We Break (Penguin Random House, October 14, 2025) – **Available for Pre-order now** .
It’s not just about creating something meaningful in the world. It’s about coming home to ourselves.
Author – Jane Chen
