Episode Details

Design your very own Life. In this episode of Inspired Evolution, it feels almost as though we're in the movie inception. We're inspired by User Experience (UX) Designer and Co-Founder of Harness Projects: Chris Ventura to harness the power of design to not just learn better but to actually design a life of our highest potential.

Chris is an entrepreneur who is passionate about education and the role it has in forming the society around us. In 2017, he co-founded a project-based learning company called Harness Projects, to address the gaps he saw in traditional education. As well as a mechanism to leverage the power of the learning market to make social change. During the early part of his career, Chris describes himself as “your typical corporate wage slave”. Working long hours and expending enormous amounts of energy on projects with little meaningful impact. Around 2010, Chris' natural curiosity moved into the self-development field. Trying to integrate an emerging perspective of spirituality and mindfulness in an office environment devoid of much feeling. By 2015, he left that world and begin to integrate his corporate skills in product management, digital & user experience design with his well-being practices. Chris is a world-bridger, constantly moving between a world of commercialization, finances and corporate governance to a world of mindfulness, empathy, and impact. He believes there are 2 types of social activists. Those that work outside the system to raise awareness of the problems in the world and those that work within it to invent creative solutions and businesses so they evolve and take us forward in a positive way.

Setting up this innovative design company with his partner, Chris has also, on a meta-level, effectively designed his life as an entrepreneur. But Chris keeps it very real with us in this podcast, he reminds us that living life on your own terms isn't always glitz and glam, there's a lot that comes with that package that is not for the faint-hearted.

Chris considers Education as a fundamental pillar of society. It plays a vital role in shaping human behavior on an individual scale and ultimately on a macro, society-wide scale. It's important that people find the courage to invest in themselves to develop a foundation of strength & ability, so they can become of service to the society around them. Without this cycle of growth and sharing, our society is at risk of becoming increasingly isolationist and polarised. And so, we explore what UX design is all about and why Chris is so passionate about functional design and the mission/philosophy of Harness Projects.

Harness Projects partners with companies looking to make a positive social impact. Harness projects the recruits students passionate to learn through hands-on experience, through the art of doing, whilst being guided and mentored by some of Australia's best designers on real-world projects with real-world outcomes and successes!

Chris lets us in on his personal life sharing the moments when his life really started changing for the better: when he consciously started socializing with people that brought out the best in him, encouraged him to be more creative and live with greater authenticity. He also reflects on the fact that when he started this journey, he did not have “a single entrepreneurial bone in his body”. Which is inspiring considering his success with Harness Projects today! We explore Chris' personal value of compassion and how that's infused in the way of working as a designer that is creating outcomes for real-world people.

Chris reflects on the development of his “inner-world” through practices such as mindfulness and meditation and how that transformed his relationship with the “outer-world” which, when he was working for corporations was spent engaging his energy on stuff that excited or mattered to him directly.

The was a gap that Chris identified with his partner between education