About the speaker:
Bio: Vaidehi Supatkar is a Design Strategist and Researcher advancing equitable health innovation at Philips, where she leads design research for an AI-enabled obstetric ultrasound solution in partnership with the Gates Foundation.
Her work focuses on improving maternal health access in underserved settings by:
Mapping care ecosystems, service workflows, and value exchanges
Co-designing with frontline communities through participatory research and usability testing
Translating insights into safety strategies, Usability planning, and use documentation aligned with regulatory and market requirements—while centering dignity and care in service delivery
Grounded in UX design and social science, Vaidehi brings global experience across humanitarian, nonprofit, and public sectors—working to design with, not just for, communities to build systems of care that are more inclusive, responsive, and just.
Short Description:
"Ecosystem ecology is the integrated study of living (biotic) and non-living (abiotic) components of ecosystems and their interactions within an ecosystem framework. This science examines how ecosystems work and relates this to their components such as chemicals, bedrock, soil, plants, and animals." - Wikipedia
This workshop will test a framework for mapping civic service ecosystem ecology with components including people, funding, technology, legislation, and program. The activity aims to help designers within government grapple with, define, demystify and share understanding of the complexity that surrounds civic service delivery.
About the speaker:
My name is Abigail Fisher (she/they). I'm a civic designer and public servant focused on breaking down bureaucracy so that communities can design for themselves. In my practice, I pull from co-design, grassroots organizing, narrative change, service design, participatory public engagement, and various forms of craft and making. I am a queer, neurodivergent person. My favorite projects are where I can weave my lived experience with my design skills.
Join us for an interactive session where we will learn about circular economies and how service design can help better prepare us for the future. There will be a discussion around the application of circular economy principles in service design.
The circular economy is a system where materials never become waste and nature is regenerated. In a circular economy, products and materials are kept in circulation through processes like maintenance, reuse, refurbishment, remanufacture, recycling, and composting. The circular economy tackles climate change and other global challenges, like biodiversity loss, waste, and pollution, by decoupling economic activity from the consumption of finite resources. - Ellen MacArthur Foundation
Speaker: Gaëlle Le Gélard, Design Lead for Climate Consultant - "I'm passionate about finding ways to use the power of design – whether it is systems, speculative, regenerative, service or circular – to inspire decisions makers, create visions of better futures, and implement the kind of change we want to see in the world."
Session 1: Naming the Rupture: Grief, Groundlessness, and the Unspoken Realities of Public Service
Many of us in public service and service design have been navigating grief in silence: lost programs, lost roles, lost colleagues, and lost trust. Some of us have been laid off or pushed out. Others are still inside, holding on by a thread. What we share is that we haven’t had a place to say it out loud.
Our first session will be a space to name the rupture: to open a space to grieve, name, and witness what’s been lost without rushing to meaning or action.
This session is an invitation especially for those who have already left government or feel they’ve been left behind to be in community, speak the unspoken, and remember: grief itself is resistance.
Reflect privately on what we’ve had to let go of (by force or by choice)
Hear from Amy about how groundlessness and grief can be practices of truth-telling
Share, if we choose, in small group or silent reflection
Create a shared space of mourning, solidarity, and care
Anyone working in or adjacent to government who is grieving something unacknowledged
Service designers and public servants who have lost jobs or programs
Those feeling the disorientation of a system that’s shifting beneath them
You don’t need to come with clarity or a story. Just bring your presence. This is a space to rest, not perform.
Session 2: Making Meaning in Motion: Practicing Presence and Possibility After the Fall
This is the second part of our gentle series for those navigating uncertainty in public service. If Naming the Rupture was about grief, this session is about what’s still here and what might emerge when we stop waiting for things to stabilize.
We’ll explore how small practices, inner anchors, and quiet connection can help us stay human in systems that are unraveling. You don’t need to feel ready, hopeful, or resilient. You just need to be here.
This session welcomes those who joined the first, and those just arriving.
Reflect on what (if anything) is helping us stay steady right now
Learn how “making meaning in motion” can be a gentle leadership practice
Share in small groups: tiny practices, people, or thoughts that help us continue
Create a collective ecosystem of anchors, a living map of care in motion
Public servants, designers, and systems stewards inside or outside of government
Anyone who feels unmoored and wants to make space for presence, not pressure
Those who need connection, even if just for an hour
Amy J. Wilson is a systems strategist, author of Empathy for Change: How to Create a More Understanding World, and the founder of Culture Shift Studio. With two decades of experience inside government and mission-driven organizations, she helps people lead with emotional intelligence, navigate uncertainty, and evolve complex systems with care.
Amy served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow across two administrations and has worked at the intersection of public service, design, and cultural healing. Her work invites people to slow down, reconnect to what matters, and build meaningful change, even when the future is unclear.
Description: Our session will dive into designing responsive primary health care systems in Sub-Saharan Africa. We’ll introduce the Community Insights to Action Framework by VillageReach, which highlights the importance of generating user insights and empowering different health system cadres to act on this feedback
Collective Decision-making with Isabella Bruno
Lab Description
Collective Decision-making can sound like it’s only for communes and co-ops but you might be doing it more than you think.
Have you ever voted on where to go for lunch? Collective Decision-making...
Have you been the only one without your camera on and when you said you were “camera’d out” everyone else turned theirs off? Collective Decision-making…
Have you used voting in a workshop? Collective Decision-making…
Let’s get together and talk about ways to share decisions frequently and easily. Bring your favorite messy decision stories and we’ll hang out in the alternate reality of intentional and deliberate decision methods.
Join me in my journey through 2 service design projects/roles (current and previous) across local and global contexts and customers, with digital-physical products, programmes and outcomes.
Speaker Bio
Melisa knew that she wanted to be a designer from the age of 4. People are at the heart of her work; she believes that human-centred design informs meaningful, engaging and sustainable solutions.
Her 20-year professional journey has ranged from retail insights, branding and masterplanning, interior architecture, wayfinding, signage and urban morphology, to digital experience. She has most recently been working on Innovation, Service Design and Experience Design for physical-digital products and programmes, as well as playing a mentoring role to young designers in and out of the public service.
Description
Ned will talk about the grassroots movement in UK gov to 'grow' approaches to more environmentally friendly digital services. In particular he will focus on work he has led to co-design a set of principles and associated guidance for the design and delivery of greener services with colleagues both inside and outside of government.
Bio
Ned is a service designer at the UK’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, where he collaborates with colleagues across government to develop the ecosystem of training materials, guidance, standards and tools needed to enable the design and delivery of 'greener' government services. Prior to that he spent several years on a project focused on tracking waste and resources and empowering the move to a more circular economy. Before the civil service he worked for a startup and agencies on design projects big and small in a wide range of industries.
About: As designers, we were inspired by the potential of the Life Experience initiative to make government work better for people. The ambitious goals of this work included busting through agency silos, radically collaborating with folks from different levels of government as well as old adults and staff at community based organizations, and creating solutions to support people transitioning to retirement age. We expected this work would result in transformational change and impact - but did it? We share our reflections on this question and opportunities to think differently moving forward.
Description
The Customer Experience (CX) team at the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Human Capital Management Office recently compiled an Administrative Burden Toolkit, including an Administrative Burden Guide and Tool. These resources were designed to help anchor VHA administrative burden reduction efforts – for both practitioners and customers – around a unified definition set, a standard process, and diverse engagement strategies for customers who can help to identify and alleviate burden in their areas of work. The VHA CX team will share these resources and talk about their plans to use these tools as part of their continuous process improvement efforts to enhance human resource operations and employee experience at VHA.
In this lightning talk and discussion, one of our members, Cara, will instigate a generative conversation between liberative religious ethics and design justice. We'll discuss how those might help us think about how our services impact people existentially, spiritually, mentally, emotionally, logistically, etc. We'll then discuss how we might design for holistic wellbeing.
Bio: Cara Curtis is a social ethicist, design researcher, community builder, and mom. For the past 15 years, her work has focused on bringing together rigorous research methods and practical, everyday knowledge to build more equitable and joyful communities. As a scholar in religious studies, she has often approached this work with an eye toward the both the existential traumas and spiritual resources of the communities she engages. Her doctoral work at Emory University, for example, focused on understanding US mothers’ conceptions and practices of “flourishing” in the context of deep social inequality and systemic under-resourcing of care work. Prior to earning her PhD, Cara completed an M.Div from Harvard Divinity School and a BA from Haverford College. She now works professionally as a design researcher and strategist in the public sector, using research to help design equitable and user-friendly digital tools for government.
Description
The Customer Experience (CX) team at the Veterans Health Administration (VHA) Human Capital Management Office recently compiled an Administrative Burden Toolkit, including an Administrative Burden Guide and Tool. These resources were designed to help anchor VHA administrative burden reduction efforts – for both practitioners and customers – around a unified definition set, a standard process, and diverse engagement strategies for customers who can help to identify and alleviate burden in their areas of work. The VHA CX team will share these resources and talk about their plans to use these tools as part of their continuous process improvement efforts to enhance human resource operations and employee experience at VHA.
Description:
Introducing the emerging practice of life-centred design, expanding human centred design to include the needs of nature and vulnerable people to nurture a thriving balance for all life.
Bio: Damien Lutz is the Founder of the Life-centred Design Lab, an innovation hub supporting designers, agencies, organisations, and governments to be more sustainable, inclusive, and regenerative. He is also the Co-Founder of The Life-centred Design Collective, and author of The Life-centred Design Guide, The Non-human Persona Guide, and Future Scouting.
This is a follow up to the February talk. This will be an interactive session to practice Object Oriented UX (OOUX). As designers in government, we know the challenge of creating services that deal with legislative, technical, and social complexity. In addition to the important work of journey and experience mapping, we must also consider: what are the real world 'things' -- Objects -- that people interact with to accomplish their goal in a given journey? And how can we ensure that Objects cohere across physical and digital worlds to create mutual meaning for end-users and service workers? This lab will apply Object Oriented UX (OOUX).
Speaker Bio: As a writer, artist, and design leader, Kristin finds joy in bringing people together and creating in a way that respects the diversity of all life. She works efficiently at a sustainable pace across industries, disciplines, and levels of ambiguity. She centers lived experiences in the design of our shared future. She currently works as a civic technologist, strategist, and UX designer at Coforma, an ethics-first technology and user research firm working for public good.
With the introduction of Wicked Problems as a design concern, complexity and ways to address it in various contexts have been at the forefront of design research and practice. Commonly, "system mapping" techniques borrowed from systems engineering and other disciplines (biology, sociology, etc.) are used by designers to represent complexity in sociotechnical systems. There are many limitations to this static approach, however, and new methods are needed to capture the dynamics of systems as their component parts interact and change. In this presentation, Evan Barba (Georgetown University) and Adeline Hvidsten (Kristiana University Norway) will outline their current work in Playable Systems — a design methodology intended to pick up where traditional systems mapping leaves off, and allows designers to better facilitate and capture complexity and emergence in sociotechnical systems.
Join us as author and design strategist Amy Wilson shares the use of game design to explore ethics in tech. She has used a range of different game design approaches and frameworks as well as various ethics frameworks (like the Tarot Cards of Tech). She will share about an Action Cycle she ran where she worked on prototyping a game for ethics in tech.
Amy (she/her) is an empath, a highly sensitive person, and empathy is her biggest strength. She is the author of Empathy for Change: How to Create a More Understanding World. She places value in building relationships and connecting with others, and knows first-hand that many of our workplaces, culture, and systems lack compassion. She’s struggled with being an empath in a non-empathetic world.
She’s spent a lifetime driving change across many sectors, from the White House, management consulting, nonprofits, and local government. Transformation is core to who she is — she’s moved from hurting, to healing, to helping our communities understand ourselves and thrive. Her mission is to enable the world to live with a finer spirit of hope and achievement through deeper levels of compassion.
In this training, you will develop a clearer understanding of which areas are emerging focus in design ethics and how you can make a difference in responsible design practices. You will gain confidence to identify potential ethical issues in your work and make a case for action before any harm is done.
You will learn how common ethical issues are in everyday life, a simple tool to use to ground ethical conversations, and at least one method for kick-starting ethical conversations inside your organization.
Cennydd Bowles (UK) is an interaction designer, futurist, and tech ethicist helping technology teams build more responsible products and services. His views on responsible technology have been quoted in media such as The Guardian, WIRED, The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. Cennydd has worked across a range of UK technology companies, including heading design at Twitter UK. Cennydd is the author of the book 'Future Ethics', reviewed as "a must read for anyone who is inventing the future". He is a visiting lecturer at the Royal College of Art and has spoken on responsible innovation at Facebook, Stanford University and Google. He holds a Master’s in IT from the University of Nottingham, is reading practical ethics at the University of Oxford, and is a member of the Association of Professional Futurists.
Ariel Guersenzvaig (Argentina) is a design professor who engages with the ethical impact of machine intelligence on society as a teacher and researcher. He has published scholarly work on this subject on important journals and lectured at the European Design Awards, and design firms like Fjord and Designit. He regularly delivers presentations on the topic at conferences and appear on the media, where he's published several op-eds in leading newspapers. Ariel has a PhD in design theory from the University of Southampton, an MA in ethics and philosophy of religion from the University of Birmingham. Besides the ethics of technology, and, more specifically, AI ethics, he also works on the related topic of design professional ethics. His book 'The Goods of Design: Professional Ethics for Designers', was reviewed as "Essential" by Choice Magazine. He is a full professor at Elisava Barcelona School of Design and Engineering, where he's the chair of the MA in UX Design program. Ariel is also a member of the Research Ethics Board at the University of Vic, Spain.
Two of our members, Elisa and Julia, will share their experience taking the Foundations of Humane Technology course offered by the Center for Humane Technology. They will walk us through at least one tool and allow us to practice using it. We encourage everyone to sign up for the course and take it in groups.
The design industry’s relationship to the field of business has long been established and continues to become further entangled each year. But designers aren’t just satisfied with only disrupting the business sector—they’re keen to disrupt the social sector too. Unfortunately, the weaknesses baked into the discipline of design (that have been present from the start) are readily exposed when designers enter complex social issues and treat them like any other human-centered innovation challenge. The lack of a moral framework, let alone a set of ethical guidelines, put designers at great risk of doing more harm than good.
About the speaker: George co-founded Greater Good Studio in 2011, to use design to heal, be just, and be restorative. Previously, he spent seven years at a global innovation firm before being hired as the first human-centered designer at the Chicago Transit Authority. Since founding Greater Good, he has guided clients and teams through complex projects that honor reality, create ownership, and build power. He speaks frequently across the US and internationally. George is an adjunct lecturer at Northwestern University. Previously, he was a Full Professor (Adj) at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Summary: We will share about a project where a team of service designers and a Medicaid policy and operations subject matter expert (SME) helped a cross-functional group of product stakeholders align on the future vision for a product. The project spanned from user research, feature ideation, creation of storytelling materials, all the way to facilitating sessions to align business stakeholders and product leadership to the product vision and roadmap. The policy SME input was essential in helping pin point the user needs and pain points and co-ideate the future product features, while the service designers helped execute the research, communicate the vision, and facilitate successful product and business stakeholder alignment. The collaborative approach helped build trust with key policy stakeholders and allow product leadership to successfully produce a roadmap.
Audience takeaways: This session will provide the audience with specific design and messaging examples that were successful for storytelling and building trust and buy-in with business owners and policy-focused users. They will come away with some key strategies for how to use service design to effectively communicate with and engage policy staff in product design and development to get their buy-in and participation in the process. We will highlight the cultural changes needed on both the product side (more staffing of designers and SMEs together) and the government side (embracing HCD and agile practices). We will also share tips on successful collaboration between SMEs and designers.
Bios
Rebecca Bruno is a health care policy and operations subject matter expert, particularly in the area of Medicaid and underserved populations. She has worked at the city, state, and federal levels developing, researching, interpreting, and implementing policy, including over five years at Center for Medicaid and CHIP Services (CMCS).
As a Principal Policy Strategist at A1M Solutions, Rebecca combines subject matter expertise and strategy with human-centered design to develop user-centric products and services for CMCS. She is passionate about bringing together policy, technology, and user-centered design. Rebecca has a master’s degree in Political Management from The George Washington University and a bachelor’s degree in Political Science from Boston University.
Sara Camnasio (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary designer and researcher focused on public services, science, and climate projects. Her work spans from helping the federal government design more equitable and human-centered services, to integrating participatory approaches into wildlife reintroduction projects, to creating design-based education curricula to engage students on ocean conservation. She leverages tools and methods from human-centered design, participatory design, interaction design, and ethnographic research.
As a Sr. Service Designer at XCell, she’s currently part of an enterprise design team within CMCS. She coaches product teams to apply HCD and service design methods to reduce burden on policy staff and she helps create standards, guidelines, and templates to keep growing CMCS’s HCD capabilities. She’s passionate about helping organizations design with people, not just for people.
Racism Untaught is focused on cultivating learning environments for people to further explore issues of race and racism, from the obvious to the invisible. Racism Untaught is a toolkit that uses the design research process to assists participants in identifying racialized design and critically assess anti-racist design approaches. Developed by Lisa Mercer and Terresa Moses, this toolkit is meant for educators, students, and organizations interested in uncovering design that perpetuates elements of racism and creating artifacts, systems, and/or experiences that help solve elements of racism. Racism Untaught was originally developed due to an identified gap and opportunity for educators to foster conversations and learning environments focused on diversity, inclusion, and equity to ensure new ideas, critical thinking, and diverse forms of making.
It provides a framework for identifying, contextualizing, and re-imagining forms of racialized design. It is imperative that educators and organizations possess the tools necessary to foster conversations and learning environments with a focus on diversity, inclusion, and equity. The identifiers focused on include critically analyzing and identifying artifacts, systems, and experiences.
Our goal is to facilitate workshops to help participants learn how to identify systems, artifacts, and experiences that perpetuates elements of racism. The learning objectives are focused on:
• Critically assess and analyze racialized design in the forms of artifacts, systems and experiences.
• Work collaboratively throughout the design research process to create design solutions that challenge racism
• Increase capacity to re-imagine and develop forward thinking design solutions
BIOS
Terresa Moses (she/her) is a proud Black queer woman dedicated to the liberation of Black and brown people through art and design. She is the Creative Director at Blackbird Revolt and an Assistant Professor of Graphic Design and the Director of Design Justice at the University of Minnesota. As a community-engaged scholar, she created Project Naptural and co-created Racism Untaught. She is currently a PhD candidate in Social Justice Education at the University of Toronto. She serves as a core team member of African American Graphic Designers and as a collaborator with the Black Liberation Lab.
Lisa Elzey Mercer (she/her) is a designer, educator, and researcher. Her interests are in developing and executing design interventions that fuel and sustain responsible design for social impact. The developed frameworks and tools are intended to create a space for conversation and knowledge exchange where participants can collaborate in creating new ideas and solutions. This type of methodology is evident in her current projects Operation Compass and Racism Untaught. She is an Associate Professor of Graphic Design and Design for Responsible Innovation at the University of Illinois.
Description: As designers in government, we know the challenge of creating services that deal with legislative, technical, and social complexity. In addition to the important work of journey and experience mapping, we must also consider: what are the real world 'things' -- Objects -- that people interact with to accomplish their goal in a given journey? And how can we ensure that Objects cohere across physical and digital worlds to create mutual meaning for end-users and service workers?
This talk will discuss the 4 pillars of Object Oriented UX (OOUX), the psychology behind the importance of Objects in design, common issues encountered, and a methodology for discovering and defining Objects.
Speaker Bio: As a writer, artist, and design leader, Kristin finds joy in bringing people together and creating in a way that respects the diversity of all life. She works efficiently at a sustainable pace across industries, disciplines, and levels of ambiguity. She centers lived experiences in the design of our shared future. She currently works as a civic technologist, strategist, and UX designer at Coforma, an ethics-first technology and user research firm working for public good.
Description: The City of Philadelphia recently launched the Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit. Led by the PHL Service Design Studio, the toolkit was created by City of Philadelphia engagement practitioners and community members and serves as a compass for equitable community engagement within City government.
Come listen and contribute as we hear from Danita Reese, Deputy Director of Strategic Design, and Andrea Ngan, Community Co-Design Practice Lead, about their experiences in developing the toolkit. You'll learn more about the journey to create the toolkit and lessons they gleaned along the way. You’ll also have the opportunity to ask questions and learn how you can bring a similar approach to community engagement to your jurisdiction.
Bios
Andrea Ngan (she/her) is a community-based and healing-centered designer, strategist, and facilitator. Her work aims to build power with and for communities marginalized by design. She is the initiator and co-director of Creative Resilience Collective, Creative Resilient Youth, and Design Justice Network’s Philadelphia Node. In 2020, Andrea joined the PHL Service Design Studio (SDS) as a founding team member. Over the course of three years, she co-led the research, design, development, and implementation of a citywide Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit. She is currently leading efforts to build a practice of collaborative design as the City of Philadelphia’s first Community Co-Design Practice Lead. Prior to her work in public service, Andrea designed interactive installations and media for cultural organizations, museums, and public spaces.
Danita Reese is a design strategist at the City of Philadelphia’s Service Design Studio who brings nearly twenty years of communications, operations, and service design experience to her work. Her curiosity to understand how people and complex organizations function has led her to work in the consulting, engineering, financial services, government, healthcare, non-profit, and retail industries. She relies on the intersections, patterns, and best practices from these experiences to ground and infuse her work.As a storytelling enthusiast (and enthusiast in general), outside of work you can find her creating art, officiating special events, helping her parents navigate their technology tools, and generating spontaneous bouts of laughter and fun with family, friends, and strangers.
Description: Participatory design has long been concerned with creating and sustaining democratic workplaces. There has been a turn in participatory design to the public sphere, and to questions of how to support the work of democracy. In this talk, I’ll share case studies of how we have used design and participatory methods to foster engagement between residents, community-based organizations, and local government, often around contentious issues. In doing so, I’ll draw our attention to how “problem-making” may be just as critical as problem-solving for addressing our social and political conditions.
Bio: Carl DiSalvo is a Professor in the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His work explores how communities use technology for social and political goals. He is the author of Design as Democratic Inquiry (2022) and Adversarial Design (2012) and an editor of the journal Design Issues.
The vital role of EX in organisational performance (CX, innovation and financial success)
The role of leaders and designers in delivering a great EX
Differences between EX and CX and why it’s important to be clear about them
How to get started with EX design and the challenges along the way (lessons from EX pioneers)
Speaker Bio:
Belinda Gannaway, employee experience coach, trainer and author
Belinda is a passionate and creative employee experience, engagement and communications specialist, supporting global brands, NGOs and growing businesses to innovate and grow with purpose and values at the core. She works with people, comms and L&D leaders, as well as with the c-suite to help them understand and meaningfully impact culture and employee experience. She is a team and systems coach, speaker and trainer.
With a background in journalism, marketing and PR, Belinda is now director of award-winning culture activation agency FathomXP and co-author of EX by Design – How to create an effective EX for competitive advantage (second edition to be published by Kogan Page in 2024). The book draws on positive psychology and design thinking to offer new tools to work on EX at a strategic and solution level.
In recent years Belinda and FathomXP have won industry awards for their ground-breaking work on purpose and culture. Belinda speaks widely at global events on employee experience and organizational culture. She was named one of HR Magazine’s Most Influential Thinkers in 2022.
Description:
If you ask today’s leaders what they’d most like to be, “data-driven’ is a common response. This phrase is akin to a trope, yet just 1 in 4 leaders say they’re data-driven today. The truth is that data-driven cultures are designed with this intention, and include folks beyond the data team.
This talk shares six steps to design a data-driven culture. You’ll learn how to find the right C-level sponsor, what data domains are, how to define data quality, and the most important aspect of a data-driven culture.
Speaker Bio:
Lauren is an award-winning analyst and designer whose practice includes writing and executing research plans, leading user interviews, hosting usability testing, and creating assets like personas, process and journey maps, service blueprints, and content strategy/migration. Today, Lauren works as a service designer at Steampunk, a human-centered design firm serving the federal government. She is also a founding editor of Springer’s AI and Ethics journal and an area editor for Data and Policy, an open access journal with Cambridge University Press. She has presented her research on bias in AI at venues including Princeton and Columbia Universities, Google DevFest DC, and Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters.
Prior to joining Steampunk, Lauren was an associate principal analyst at Gartner, where she covered the impact of emerging tech like AI and blockchain on small business owners. Lauren has written for Harvard Data Science Review, Financial Times, and The Guardian, among other publications. She has also peer reviewed technology research and books published by the GovLab at NYU, O’Reilly Media, and The Atlantic Council.
Lauren is a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, a member of the Association for Computing Machinery’s Distinguished Speakers Program, and a member of the International Academy of Digital Arts and Sciences, where she helps judge the Webby Awards.
Lauren earned her BA from The Catholic University of America, where she was a CUA Oxford Honors Scholar at St. Catherine’s College, Oxford. She earned her MSc from The London School of Economics and Political Science and a certificate in Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy from MIT Sloan.
Making our Assumptions Visible: Using Data to Support Equitable Service Delivery with Sam Powers (September 27 + October 11, 2023)
Description:
Data is a powerful value add that we can use to test solutions, show opportunities for intervention, and highlight customer pain points. But, how we choose to gather, analyze, and report our data centers a perspective and is based in assumptions about how the world operates. Using stories and practical advice, this presentation will outline some tools and steps you can take in the government context to be honest about the assumptions made and perspectives centered by the way data is used in your work so you and your partners can decide whether or not those are the correct assumptions for your context.
Speaker Bio:
Sam Powers (he/him) is a data scientist with the US Digital Service where he focuses on using data to inform equitable service delivery in domains including grant making, disaster recovery, and government workforce development. Prior to USDS, Sam worked in other data roles across government, most recently as the data science lead for the policy office at the Small Business Administration. He loves being in government, but reflects fondly on work he did as the first community data fellow at the Equity Center at the University of Virginia, which cemented his interest in and approach to using data to guide policy.
Role Stress in Service Design with Professor Cameron Tonkinwise (September 13, 2023)
DESCRIPTION:
In the politics and theatre of service design, what differentiates service design from all other forms of design is that it is primarily thedesign of people, rather than the design of things for people. This makes service designunavoidably political and can cause role stress when a particular person experiences different and often opposing expectations and demands by various actors in the service landscape and even from the service system, itself. Often, a key aspect to service design projects is, therefore, managing the role stress that certain service actors will experience, especially as they move between various roles, flexibly negotiated in response to different expectations.
BIO:
Professor Cameron Tonkinwise is an international expert in design studies and transition design and the Research Director of the Design Innovation Research Centre at UTS. He writes and speaks extensively on the power of design to drive systems-level change to achieve more sustainable and equitable futures.
Cameron has long advocated for the field of Design Studies and its importance to ensuring the social responsibility of design professionals. His expertise has reshaped traditional thinking around how designers should be educated, and he has established Design Studies programs at the Parsons The New School for Design (New York), Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and UTS, among others, that have transformed international design curricula. He has written a number of influential articles on design thinking, design ethics, design research and speculative design.
More recently, Cameron has emerged as a leading voice in the field of Transition Design, as part of his long-standing research and teaching around Sustainable Design. He was an early champion of the Sharing Economy while taking over the leadership of the EcoDesign Foundation from its founders, Tony Fry & Anne-Marie Willis. This expertise shapes Cameron’s work at the Design Innovation Research Centre at UTS, which has a focus on multidisciplinary social and service design research. Under Cameron’s leadership, the research team now incorporates a transition design focus into their projects, tackling immediate, organisation-specific design challenges while simultaneously addressing the underlying systemic issues that cause these challenges to occur. Current work includes a project to help Australian banks transition toward more inclusive services and even act on behalf of vulnerable community members suffering financial abuse, and a project to help energy providers better understand how to design changes in everyday household life that will enable more sustainable distributed energy systems.
Cameron is a highly sought-after speaker at academic and industry conferences and events: among others, he has delivered invited keynote addresses at NorDes, LeanAgile Scotland, the Australian Design Research Conference, AgileAustralia, and Media Architecture Biennale. He has been on the editorial board of of Design Philosophy Papers since 2003 and Design and Culture since 2009; he is also a regular reviewer of articles for Design Studies and book manuscripts for Bloomsbury.
Description:
The “life experience” organizing framework requires a new model of the Federal delivery system working together—within agencies, across agencies, even across levels of government — driven by customer (“human-centered design”) research, rather than within bureaucratic silos and pre-conceived solutions, to solve problems.
Calculating a More Holistic Burden Estimate project came out of discovery research conducted for the Recovering from a Disaster Life Experience project. One of the key insights that emerged was that the assistance process is full of administrative burden, such as extensive paperwork, siloed agency processes, and inaccessible communication. These barriers exacerbate confusion and inequity. Those who have the greatest need may not receive support due to the challenging process.
In order to begin to address these issues, the burden project aims to define and blueprint an end-to-end view of the effort required of disaster survivors and small business owners to apply for, maintain, and receive Federal disaster assistance benefits. The burden estimate provides a baseline measure to calculate the impact of improvement efforts. While this project is specifically looking at the disaster assistance process, the overarching goal is to create a process and approach to understanding and measuring burden that can be used by all HISPs.
Megan will present the team's approach to measuring burden along with an early prototype for feedback and discussion with the group.
Bio:
Megan is a Customer Experience Lead in the Customer Experience Center of Excellence (CX CoE) in the Technology Transformation Services within the General Services Administration. The CX CoE is a group of designers and strategists that collaborate with agency stakeholders and staff to address complex challenges impacting the experiences of their customers. She is currently the engagement lead for one of the Recovering from a Disaster Life Experience projects. Prior to joining the CX CoE in 2022, she worked as a UX Designer at 18F and also as a UX Strategist for the City of Philadelphia. Megan holds a Bachelor's Degree in Human Services from Chestnut Hill College, and will be pursuing a Masters in Public Administration from the Fels School of Government at the University of Pennsylvania in the fall. She received a Service Design Practitioner Accreditation through the Service Design Network.
Description: This talk will present an alternative to expert-driven systemic design approaches and illuminate the ways that systemic design plays out in mundane aspects of our everyday lives. By weaving in personal narratives, Josina will show the entanglement of bodies and social systems and their mutual transformation. This talk opens up questions about re-thinking the role of systemic designers to cultivate collective reflexivity and enable autonomous communities.
Bio: Josina Vink (they/them) is Associate Professor of Design at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design (AHO) and Design Lead for the Center for Connected Care (C3) in Norway. Josina has ten years of experience working as a service and systemic designer in healthcare internationally, including at the Mayo Clinic in the United States, the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Canada and Experio Lab in Sweden. They are currently Associate Professor in Design at AHO and Design Lead in the Center for Connected Care (C3) in Norway. In general, Josina’s work focuses on the collective reshaping of social structures to create equitable health and care systems.
About the Talk: “The community economy has the capacity to politicize the economic in new ways… economy as a site of decision, of ethical praxis, instead of as the ultimate reality/container/constraint; and all economic practices as inherently social and always connected in their concrete particularities to the ‘commerce of being together’” (Gibson-Graham, 2006, p. 194–195; Nancy, 2000, p. 74)
In the first presentation on Design after Capitalism, we talked about the concept of "community economies" as mapped and defined by J.K. Gibson-Graham (the "tip of the iceberg" diagram). In the workshop, we will take up this line of thinking to ask how government services might be designed with a focus on all those diverse economic models below the "water line" of the capitalist market.
We'll start with a general discussion of these points. During the workshop, we'll work through a series of steps to ask questions and sketch ideas based on a specific US federal program, full of complex and challenging systems of services and transactions. Specifically, the workshop will draw the attention of service designers toward diverse models of transaction, labor, and enterprise. Participants will collaborate to brainstorm and sketch new government services that can direct resources or even fully collaborate with the abundant diversity of practices already operating in community economies.
About the Trainer: Matthew Wizinsky is a designer, educator, and researcher with over 20 years of professional design experience. He is Graduate Program Director (Master of Design) & Associate Professor in the Ullman School of Design, University of Cincinnati; Associate Editor for the design journal Visible Language; PhD researcher in Transition Design at Carnegie Mellon University; and author of the book Design After Capitalism (MIT Press, 2022).
About the Talk: Designer, educator, and author Matthew Wizinsky will give a brief presentation on key themes from the recent book Design after Capitalism (MIT Press, 2022). Wizinsky will discuss challenges and opportunities for design practices to move beyond extractive tendencies typical of those developed in a capitalist mindset, including service design. The talk includes discussion of alternative economic frameworks and case studies of diverse design practices hinting toward “postcapitalist” models of practice. The talk will conclude with some points of consideration for the ensuring workshop. After the talk, there will be Q&A.
About the Talk: Service designers integrate front-stage and back-stage design into a cohesive, effective system. When we redesign the back-stage to better support the front-stage, we are dipping into the organizational design toolkit. In this talk, we will explore what the field of organizational design has to offer us as service designers.
What is org design?
How can organizational design choices drive innovation?
How can we apply human centered design to reimagining organizations?
What practical tools are out there?
About Stephanie Gioia:
Stephanie identifies as a white woman with roots in the Pacific Northwest United States. She uses she/her/hers pronouns.
Stephanie Gioia is a founding partner at Future Work Design with a focus on strategic planning and organizational innovation. Stephanie was one of the earliest strategists to use the power of Human Centered Design to solve organizational design challenges. Prior to co-founding Future Work Design, she built her design consulting reputation at IDEO and XPLANE and continues to draw upon her roots on the front lines of organizational change management in the financial services, energy, and NGO sectors. Over 15+ years, her work has helped organizations such as P&G, City of Portland, Mercy Corps, Nike, Cambia Health, and Monterey Bay Aquarium reimagine the way they do strategic planning, shift organizational culture, and reorganize to meet changing business needs. Stephanie leads Future Work Design's strategy practice with a particular passion for serving purpose-driven organizations transitioning toward strategic agility.
Stephanie serves as Lab Director of the Either/Org project, the organizational design inspiration lab. She teaches Human Centered Design for Organizational Innovation at University of Oregon’s Executive MBA program. In the past she has taught programs at Stanford’s d.school, University of Michigan, and Pacific Northwest College of Art. She is the founder of Deckaholic, the worlds largest library of card decks for problem solving and creativity.
Stephanie holds an MBA from the University of Michigan in Strategy and Organizational Sensemaking and earned her B.A. in History and Government from Georgetown University. She lives in beautiful Klickitat country (White Salmon, WA) and is a mom to two fantastic kids.
About the talk: What is 'policy design’? And how can we do it with members of the public, not only government lawyers? In this talk, Chelsea Mauldin will discuss the Public Policy Lab’s approach to human-centered policy design. Expect frameworks, examples from past PPL work with city and federal agencies, and a proposal for a future state of policy-design efforts.
About the speaker: Chelsea Mauldin is a social scientist and designer with a focus on government innovation. She directs the Public Policy Lab, a nonprofit organization that designs better public policy with low-income and marginalized Americans. The Public Policy Lab partners with government agencies and NGOs to develop more satisfying and effective policies and service delivery through ethnographic research, human-centered design, rapid prototyping, and formative evaluation.
Chelsea is an adjunct professor at Columbia University's School of International & Public Affairs and a frequent keynote speaker and panelist. Previously, she consulted to municipal and federal agencies, directed a community-development organization, led government partnerships at a public-space advocacy nonprofit, and served as an editor for publishing, arts, and digital media organizations. She is a graduate of the University of California at Berkeley and the London School of Economics.
Session Overview: This session will introduce prototyping planning through the Prototyping Canvas, as well as showcase prototyping strategies for services. This will be an interactive session, leveraging MURAL as a digital whiteboard, for the group to start planning out prototypes and working through different prototyping strategies.
About the speaker: Carlye Lauff, PhD is a design researcher, innovation strategist, and enthusiastic instructor and facilitator of human-centered design practices. Currently, she holds positions as an Assistant Professor of Product Design at the University of Minnesota, Senior Instructor for LUMA Institute, Design Consultant for MURAL, and Design Fellow for the SUTD International Design Centre. Carlye earned her doctoral degree in design theory and methodology and her master’s degree in product design engineering. She pioneered her own research around understanding the role of prototypes in companies, and she continues to develop tools and methods to support designers.
About the talk: Sofía Bosch Gómez will present the transition design approach, its beginnings, and theoretical framework. She will show some of her work within the Mexican public service in the context of doing a Ph.D. in transition design. Finally, she will explore the connections transition design has with service design.
About the speaker: Dr. Sofía Bosch Gómez is a Postdoctoral Fellow at Northeastern’s College of Arts, Media, and Design, the Burnes Center for Social Change, and The GovLab. Sofía earned her PhD from the School of Design at Carnegie Mellon University and is a designer and researcher interested in the intersection between public service innovation and design research and education. She has worked for the Mexico City government and the Mexican federal government doing design research, user experience testing, service design, and visual communication.
https://design.cmu.edu/user/1512
About the topic: As a designer of change expert, you might be curious about what systemic design looks like in practice in an organisation, and how to actually go about using systems thinking when redesigning services.
This workshop is a real run through the overall design and the actual events that occurred during a systemic design in a real systems transformation of a service. We will look at the initial problems to be solved. Who was involved and how they developed. The method behind the design. The engagement of the leaders. And the learning and changes that occurred.
We will surface the systems thinking and complexity inherent in this approach and how they were dealt with.
The example is from the public sector Housing, and it is directly applicable to most organisations.
Bio: John Mortimer will be leading the session. John has been working with systems thinking change and design since 2003, when he joined a consultancy that pioneered this methodology. Since 2014 he has been developing this and researching the wider aspects of systems change and systemic design. He has worked in approximately 45 systemic changes.
About the Topic: When better is not ethical
When are better services actually more of the same? Come along to a conversation with Dr. Sarah Schulman, Lead Partner of InWithForward, and explore the ethics of service design: from whose world view and perspective are problems and solutions defined? Hear about some of the juicy ethical conundrums facing the InWithForward team, and how we are renegotiating questions of power, ownership, and control. Over the last 8 years, InWithForward has forged deep partnerships with cities, foundations and non-profits, leading to scalable prototypes like Curiko (to re-imagine adult disability supports), Soloss (to re-imagine grief & loss care), and Auricle (to de-colonize data).
Bio: Dr. Sarah Schulman is a white, Jewish woman living and learning on stolen Coast Salish territory, specifically the Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), Stó:lō and Səl̓ílwətaʔ/Selilwitulh (Tsleil-Waututh) and xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam) Nations. She has spent her career in buses, bingo halls, back alleyways, and board rooms. As a social scientist focused on re-imagining complex social challenges, Sarah collaborates with people, nonprofits, cities, government agencies and philanthropies to make & test alternative social support models from the ground-up. She is the Founding Partner of InWithForward, a social design shop, which brings social science and design methods together. Her teams have produced award-winning and scalable interventions like Kudoz, a learning platform for adults with cognitive disabilities, and Family by Family, a network of families helping families stay out of the child protection system. Sarah holds a B.A (honors) in Human Biology and an M.A in Education from Stanford University as well as a DPhil in Social Policy from Oxford University, where she was a Rhodes Scholar. In 2019, Sarah was a Munk Global Journalism Fellow at the University of Toronto, where she’s learning how to bring journalism, ethnography, and design together to surface and challenge stuck social narratives.
A brief workshop experience is offered for June 29, with Dr. Jones leading facilitated exercise to make the most of the book’s potential with the SDiG community. The workshop learning objective is to build an introductory level of capability and familiarity, by learning and employing a subset of the systemic design tools, through a hands-on interactive experience simulating the conditions of typical practice. The workshop will be based on a complex policy issue (Affordable Housing), that of multi-level sustainability in a large public-sector organization.
As designers, many of us understand the processes involved in the creation of technologies, services, care pathways and the broader environmental impact of our choices. We also understand how companies strive to persuade consumers into engaging with their services and the negative effects of these practices. Designers as consumers are thus, mindful of their choices as well as many of the factors that lead to these choices, creating dilemmas and affecting decision-making.
The workshop proposes a case study at the systems scale: Affordable Housing. The participants will be organized into two cohorts to develop four inter-related systems maps from the Systemic Design Toolkit as an exercise to explore the system, stakeholder relationships, and material activities. Miro boards will be set up an pre-populated with the staged maps, to give each cohort a dedicated place to develop the following set of system maps:
Actors map - Rapid stakeholder definition and relational mapping by power/knowledge and roles
Context map - Initial system scoping and assessment of meaningful trends, emerging innovations, and framing of the core systems issues
System map - Translation of the Context to the Systems map will provide a tool to inventory the system influences by the analysis of issues associated with 8 capitals (multicapitals map)
Interventions map - Mapping of sustainability and service interventions across the twelve leverage points in the Toolkit’s Interventions map (based on Meadows’ “Twelve Places to Intervene.”)
This workshop delves into the complexities of design practice in considering the requisite variety of participants in the housing system. The ethical aim of the workshop is to identify the moral tensions in the needs of constituents, their tensions in the expectation of participating as consumers, given their anticipated interests in sustainable housing. The second cohort also uses system mapping to identify tensions between the affordable housing system as a viable and cost-managed service model, and the tensions with moving toward a sustainable operation and business model of operations. The workshop poses hypothetical choice scenarios for designers making public service design decisions for systems and constituents, and the context created by the systemic design maps to present arguments and reasoning for their decisions.
Topic: Peter Jones will hold two activities with the SDG community of practice, a book talk and a workshop. On June 15 Peter will host a 90 minute presentation and discussion on the book, Design Journeys through Complex Systems. The book talk will discuss the core ideas in the book, such as the unique methodology, the progression of collaborative learning using the tools, and the style of convening workshops with mixed methods. CoP members will be encouraged to purchase the print book from the publisher or ebook link on Amazon (with a 20% discount) for more methods. The book presents a full systemic design methodology, with methods and tools summarized for individual learning and use in workshops. Each tool draws on a method or theory in the systems literature (primarily) and is translated into highly usable, validated analysis or group methods.
Talk Takeaways:
Learn about systemic design, its methods, theory and practices as advocated in a new book based on 7 years of research and development of systems thinking tools in design
Learn how systemic design can be practiced in relationship to service design, their compatibility and possible integration
Learn about the Design Journeys methodology developed for complex systems change
Learn how systemic design methodology applies across the stages of a comprehensive design project
Speaker Bio: Dr. Peter Jones is an associate professor at OCAD University, Toronto in the Strategic Foresight and Innovation and Design for Health MDes programs. Peter is a founder of the Systemic Design Association and its conference series, the RSD Symposia, and conducts research and designs tools for complex social systems design. Peter is a founder of multiple systems change programmes, from communities of practice (Design with Dialogue) to economic transformation initiatives (Bounce Beyond) and applied research labs (Flourishing Enterprise Institute). For nearly 20 years Peter has led the design of “tools for thinking,” decision support and information services for professional work practices through mixed-methods design and engaged fieldwork.
With his practice the Redesign Network, Peter facilitates system-level (systemic) design for communities, organizations, and stakeholder social systems, and conducts strategic foresight for visioning and planning. Design Journeys, published with Kristel Van Ael, is his fourth book. Peter also wrote Design for Care: Innovating Healthcare Experience, a leading text for service design in patient-centred and clinical healthcare. His articles and blog can be found at Design Dialogues.
About the talk: In this presentation, Azza will give a critical reflection on her activities as a Tunisian, woman, designer experimenting in a complex context of an emerging democracy (in Tunisia). The experiments, which are part of participatory projects, aim to co-imagine with public institutions, civil society and the community possible scenarios and futures for public participation in local life. Design has been able to bring out and make visible new meanings to abstract concepts such as democracy and public participation. These experiences demonstrate the democratising power of design (embodied-democracy ) as well as its potential to "make things happen", but also highlight the limitations of the designer's intervention as she struggles to find her place in the complex ecosystem of the participatory project.
About the speaker: Independent designer, PhD researcher in Nîmes University (France) and La Manouba University (Tunisia), Azza explores and questions the emancipatory capacities of design to acknowledge and accelerate the emergence of organic modalities of public participation.
Through her career in graphic design, academia and social design, Azza focuses on supporting and empowering public and non-profit organisations in their process of transformation to co-design inclusive and human centred solutions. Drawing on her latest experiences within the UNDP-Tunisia Accelerator Lab, she has been able to design experiments with the participation of the local ecosystem in order to rebuild the relationship of the community with public spaces and governors.
About the workshop: Join the Design for Women Workshop to incorporate an inclusive, women-centric lens in your thinking, ideation and creative toolkit. Chances are that you regularly use and (maybe even build) "gender-neutral" experiences that often overlook key needs of women. This is because today's design, strategy and innovation methodologies exclude women: under the guise of being gender-neutral, the way we work today often produce “one-size-fits-men” outcomes. Design for Women is a toolkit and methodology to help every decision maker be aware of women’s needs when creating products, services and systems. Attendees will leave the workshop with an increased understanding of how gender-neutral design methodologies overlook women; applicable key themes and design principles to evaluate and re-design products, services, and systems with a women-centric lens; and a chance to apply the learnings right away.
About the speaker: Mansi Gupta (she/her) is the founder of Unconform Studio – a design and innovation firm focused on making design for women mainstream. At Unconform, Mansi collaborates with organizations to help them get started with a Design for Women practice and apply a female-centric design lens to their products and services. Mansi has years of experience applying behavioural research & design strategy in social impact, including increasing financial inclusion among lower-income women in developing nations and designing games to research reproductive healthcare in rural India. She is the author of Unconforming, a newsletter on women and design. Mansi holds a BA in Computer Science & Economics from Bryn Mawr College, and an MFA in Products of Design from the School of Visual Arts. She grew up in India, and is now based in Amsterdam.
About the Lab Series: Rachael Dietkus will be joining us for this month's call and will be talking through a model of change for trauma-responsive design research she has been iterating. This conversation will focus on the current iteration of this model and what values and principles we all might bring to our work as designers. She hopes to have an open and rich conversation with everyone about how our values illuminate how and why we design.
This will be a casual conversation on the model of change. The Lab Series provides a space for an inclusive community of service designers to openly ideate, troubleshoot, and experiment with old and new activities and methods.
About the Lab leader: Rachael is a social worker and design researcher and strategist who focuses a majority of her time advocating for and working closely with designers and organizations on how to be more trauma-informed and trauma-responsive in their design research practices. You can find more about Rachael on LinkedIn or on her site, Social Workers Who Design.
Visual language is very helpful when we want to connect with other people, share information, build ideas together, make decisions and create a shared vision. We've heard it before, "an image says more than a thousand words", and we are already pretty good at adding images and icons to our communications.
Visual Facilitation is a bit different, we don't prepare beautiful slides and we are not looking for perfection in our imagery. The result of a visually facilitated workshop, focus group or team meeting is not measured by the visual artifact that was created, which is usually far from perfect and often messy. The added value here is the inner work that has been done and the shared mental representation that the group has built.
Drawing together, mapping ideas interactively, using images in conversations - these are tools that enable emotional engagement and deep understanding of each other's worlds.
So, how can we include visual collaboration in our meetings, workshops or groups? What should we have in mind, which tools and activities are suitable for which situation?
In this upcoming interactive talk, Cornelia will share her experience of working visually with teams both in person and remotely, and present a framework that helps us navigate the challenges we meet when facilitating visually. Be prepared to participate and engage actively in visual activities and discussion. And don't worry: absolutely no previous drawing skills needed!
About the speaker:
Cornelia Brezing started drawing at the age of 2, and, unlike many of her peers, she has not stopped practicing until now. Although her teachers recommended to enroll in the University of Fine Arts, she decided to study psychology: even more so than drawing, what was fascinated to her were people: What motivates us? How do we learn? How do we make decisions?
But during the study of psychology at the universities of Vienna (Austria) and Saarland (Germany) the desire to develop her visual talent and creativity did finally show up, and she enrolled at the University of Fine Arts, in Communication Design.
From that moment on, her professional and personal project has always been to find an enriching combination between the two disciplines: psychology and design. She started with the concepts of E-learning and Usability and devoted herself to studying in depth the psychology of both personal and media communication. She finished her psychology degree with a work on the laws of perception in web design, and her design degree with an illustrated story about the perception of reality according to constructivism.
After a phase of searching and many changes (like moving to Barcelona in 2010 and building a family) she (re-) discovered that combination she was looking for in the methodology of Visual Thinking and Facilitation.
Since 2015 she has worked with many clientes in the corporate and public world offering training, facilitation and coaching in the areas of Visual Thinking, Creativity, Innovation and Agility. She certified as a Coach, Scrum Master and Agile Coach. Since 2021 she is part of the team of Innvation Coaches and NTT DATA.
Talk Overview:
This short workshop will focus on how Behavioural Insights (BI) is aligned with and can add to existing Service Design approaches. Participants will learn more about the BI approach to testing solutions delivered through granular 'touchpoints' to shift user behaviours, and when and how to consider the value-add of conducting rigorous randomized experimentation to support evidence-based human-centred design. The BIU will share our publicly-available, interactive Behavioural Insights Workbook with participants to support continued learning.
About the speakers:
The Ontario Behavioural Insights Unit (BIU) was the first public service-based unit in Canada with a mandate to apply behavioural science to improve programs and services. Established in 2015 in the Ontario provincial government, this small team of research and policy professionals operates as an internal consultancy, partnering with ministries, government agencies and municipalities to identify potential behavioural barriers to program/ service provision, design and then field-test behaviourally-informed solutions. Using a multi-method approach, the unit has delivered nearly 30 experimental trials to date, with 13 more underway, as well as over 20 in-depth advisory service engagements. You can read more about the application of behavioural insights in Ontario in the unit's 2018 and 2020 update reports.
Talk Overview:
ServiceTitan's Service Design "Taxonomy" is a systems design initiative. It's a textual mapped hierarchy of our customers entire end-to-end experience (from the smallest feature mapped to our customers outcomes and success metrics within and external to the software). It started off as something no one had ever done or imagined could be done, and it's now become the basis for everything.
The Service Design Taxonomy affects all aspects of the company from identifying UX debt, training algorithms using Machine Learning, forming the entire Content Management System taxonomy, establishing the business case to advocate for, purchase and tag our customers end-to-end experience in a new product analytics tool all the way to the reorganization of the entire company. We'll share the steps that allowed a small but mighty and diverse all girl team to basically change the conversation across an entire organization from feature based to a focus on measurable customer outcomes.
About the speakers:
jD Buckley, Senior Director of Service Design at ServiceTitan and Adjunct Assistant Professor at ArtCenter College of Design
Pasadena, California, USA
For more than 15 years, jD has successfully led the introduction of human-centered research and design initiatives for various companies. The list spans disruptive startups, enterprise, entertainment, automotive, and medical products, including Yahoo, ADP, Idealab, DirecTV, Kelley Blue Book, Kaiser Permanente, and Daqri. jD is a passionate advocate of collaborative, co-creative and cross-functional design, multimethod research, and data triangulation. Her work inspires and informs innovative and holistic product and service solutions
Sam Hou, Service Design Researcher at ServiceTitan
Pasadena, California, USA
Sam has been conducting and advocating human centered design and research across consumer based and enterprise software companies for over 5 years. Throughout career she has been an advocate of making data driven decisions, co-creation and improving end to end experiences. She is passionate about solving meaningful problems and making people’s lives better with user-centric design. She hopes to empower those in the research and design community with her works.
Talk Overview:
Over the last two years we’ve seen a number of converging events like the Covid-19 pandemic impacting Brown and Black communities; the murders of folks in the Black community by police and vigilantes; and numerous hate crimes and murders made against the Asian community. These occurrences have deep systemic roots that will take deep solutioning with those directly impacted to truly resolve.
Thus, a racial equity lens is still necessary to think through how the way that we design products and services at the government level for staff and citizens. In this session, Alvin will reflect on aspects of his design, equity, and strategy journey that centers his work in a racial equity framing (and beyond) and which influenced the creation of the Racial DeckEquity Cardset. Participants will learn about tools such as the I-We-They IDentify Tool, the Intersectional Power Diamond, and Power Mapping, all of which allow for reflection on power & privilege dynamics at play from an interpersonal to a structural level. Such tools will hopefully give some useful reference for participants’ equity & community design practices going forward.
About the speaker:
Alvin Schexnider is a service designer, bizops strategist, equity designer, and illustrator. He uses his creative and analytical skills to help civic institutions become more effective, citizen-centered, innovative, and equitable. In total, he holds 15 years of experience and leadership across strategy, business operations, and design in the government, non-profit, and for-profit spaces. Currently, he is the outgoing Chief People Officer of the Illinois Department of Human Services (IDHS), and will soon be joining Capital One’s newly formed Equity by Design team as its Senior Equity Design Strategist. Prior roles he’s served in include: Operations Program Manager for IDHS focusing on strategy, operations, and service design projects; the COO of Erie Neighborhood House, a midsized nonprofit providing services within the immigrant community; and serving as the first Director of Operations at Greater Good Studio. Outside of his day to day work, Alvin runs an equity design firm called GraffitiVersal and previously was an Adjunct Professor of Community & Equity Design at Loyola University Chicago's Quinlan School of Business.
Resources:
Workshop Overview:
Data Ethnography can help us better understand how to determine the success of our efforts. This involves identifying how data shapes the way we think, feel and ultimately do in response to it and with it. Our workshop centers on using a template (alpha version) that participants adapt to their context. Participants should end the workshop with (1) a diagnostic of their success metric practices, and (2) realistic next steps for using the tool to improve their success metrics. “Success metrics” here include individual performance, impact of a project, the operational data of a service or program, and policy intent.
About the facilitator:
Marc K. Hébert is an anthropologist working with teams to develop and apply insights that produce better public services across digital and non-digital channels. He has spent nearly 15 years researching or practicing public sector service design, including currently leading a service and system design team in the San Francisco government. You can find his team’s portfolio of work here.
When designing with and in communities, the design process can easily fall into the trap of reinforcing the power imbalances, oppressive structures, and destructive savior-saved relationships that underpin many of the issues social sector designers seek to respond to. That’s in part because the predominant modes of design taught and practiced today place the designer at the center of the design process, where the designer claims the expertise, authority, and power to envision and execute design. Beyond what we reinforce by staying at the center is what we lose: the opportunity for design to be an experience that builds power, elevates local leadership, and creates new social capital and solidarity. In this talk, I will share a framework and tangible methods for how designers can make structural changes to the design process to decenter themselves and, in doing so, move towards a more transformative definition of design.
Biography: Betsy brings 15 years of experience as a design researcher, asset-based community development practitioner, educator, and campaign strategist to her work as Design Research Lead at Greater Good Studio. Through her work there, as well as through her writing, she explores how democratized design processes can be a force for nurturing more equitable systems, inclusive communities, and local leaders. Prior to joining GGS, she co-founded Why We Work Here, which works with rural school districts to prepare young people to shape new futures for their hometowns using design thinking and adaptive leadership. Betsy holds a Masters in City Planning from MIT and a Bachelor of Arts in Architecture from Washington University in St. Louis.
Resources:
De-centering the Designer by Betsy Ramaccia on Medium
A hands-on introduction to Applied Science Fiction. Matt will talk about design futures methods and how they can fit into the work we're doing everyday. We'll do some hands-on activities to introduce some design futures methods and frameworks.
Biography: Matt Dobson is a designer living in and working from Louisville, Kentucky. He is proud to be part of the team at 18F working to improve the user experience of the government. Prior to joining 18F, he was a product designer at Humana's Digital Experience Center. In his free time, he acts as the local leader for Louisville's IxDA chapter and has recently started a Louisville Design Futures Meetup. In the increasingly distant past, he was an art director, published a magazine, and produced a late-night variety show at a Tony Award winning theatre.
Resources:
Postcards from the Future by Viraj Joshi
“Getting Digital Done” is a brief presentation about how a Provincial Government has embraced Service Design and Agile practices to significantly transform how services are designed and delivered. From 6 full time staff 2.5 years ago to over 120 (and hiring!) we aren’t just design thinking, we’re design doing!
Biography: My career has been divided between Canada’s airline industry and the Public Service. The focus for most of my work has been business transformation to improve service delivery, increase efficiency and create more delightful experiences for customers and staff.
Whether it’s justice, social services, finance or transportation, big change usually includes technology, business process and organizational redesign. To get there I’ve used service design, agile, citizen engagement and strategic planning. Plus a bunch of listening, sticky notes and sharpies.
Resources: Slides available upon request to organizers
In this interactive talk-shop, Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel will share elements of the design and pedagogical journey that ground her focus on decolonial, liberatory, anti-oppressive, and anti-hegemonic design education, research, and practice. This philosophical grounding has led to the creation of design tools such as the Designer's Critical Alphabet and the Positionality Wheel, both of which aim to help designers engage with difference. She will share these and other projects that have been undertaken with this philosophy.
By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to:
lead a team reflection about group identity, and how this could impact their work
apply critical theory-based questions to their design practice
recognize exclusion in design, leading to more inclusive design
Biography: Dr. Lesley-Ann Noel draws on the fields of design, anthropology, business, and education in her teaching and research. Her work focuses on emancipatory and critical design thinking and design methods, on the experiences of people who are often excluded from research, and on building greater critical awareness among designers and design students. Her current research is situated in the fields of civic innovation, social innovation, and public health. In fall 2020, will join North Carolina State University as an Assistant Professor.Before joining NCSU, she was the Associate Director for Design Thinking for Social Impact and Professor of Practice at the Taylor Center for Social Innovation and Design Thinking at Tulane University, Louisiana, and also was a lecturer at the d.school at Stanford University and at the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago.
Resources:
Positionality Wheel (Download or Mural template) - This Positionality wheel can help participants reflect on their identities in an individual or group activity.
Designer's Critical Alphabet- This alphabet was first designed as a deck of cards to introduce designers and design students to critical theory and concepts to help them reflect on their design process.
The pandemic and the renewed social justice movement has forced us to change and provides a new opportunity to apply empathy in our workplaces and communities. Amy J. Wilson, the author of the recently-published book Empathy for Change: How to Create a More Understanding World.
Amy will share stories and lessons from two of her chapters “Empathizing With Others: Seek First to Understand” and “Change in Times of Coronavirus.” She’ll explain how the pandemic has increased our altruism, unearthed our broken systems and empathy deficit, and has changed our worldview for the better.
Biography: Amy J. Wilson is a change leader, community builder, movement maker, and an empathy advocate. She is the author of Empathy for Change: How to Build a More Understanding World, a guide to create positive, compassionate change where we work, live, and play. Amy is a Tech Policy Fellow at the Aspen Institute Tech Policy Hub, a policy entrepreneur developing outside-of-the-box approaches to society’s problems such as our empathy deficit, homelessness, and systemic racism. She served for three years as a Presidential Innovation Fellow (PIF), an entrepreneur-in-residence in the White House, to tackle the nation's biggest challenges across two Administrations.
Resources: Takeaways and book preview upon request to organizers
Drawing examples from his work as Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova, the Swedish government’s innovation agency, Dan Hill will outline the practice of strategic design—applying some of the principles of traditional design to "big picture" systemic challenges like public health, education, and climate and social justice crises. This practice draws from long traditions in design, but perhaps emerged coherently at SITRA’s Helsinki Design Lab a decade ago, where Hill worked alongside Marco Steinberg, Bryan Boyer and Justin Cook. Hill will also draw from his work at Arup, the international design and architecture consultancy, where he worked extensively with municipal governments and civic organisations all over the world, addressing the possibilities of emerging technology within the context of the city as a public good. Hill’s work addresses cultures of decision-making, participative co-design, radical technologies, new paradigms for cities, growth and community, and figuring out the ‘ground game’ for mission-oriented innovation, based on his work as Visiting Professor of Practice at Mariana Mazzucato’s Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose at UCL.
Biography: Dan Hill is Director of Strategic Design at Vinnova, the Swedish government’s innovation agency. A designer and urbanist, Dan’s previous leadership positions have produced innovative, influential projects and organisations, ranging across built environment (Arup in Australia and UK, Future Cities Catapult in UK), education and research (Fabrica in Italy), government and social innovation (SITRA in Finland), and media (BBC and Monocle in UK), each one transformed positively via digital technology and a holistic approach to design. He has lived and worked in the UK, Australia, Finland, Italy and Sweden. As well as being Visiting Professor of Practice at IIPP, Dan is also a visiting professor at Design Academy Eindhoven, an adjunct professor at RMIT University in Melbourne, and one of the Mayor of London's Design Advocates. He is the author of the influential playbook, “Dark Matter & Trojan Horses: A Strategic Design Vocabulary” (Strelka Press, 2012). He writes at https://medium.com/@cityofsound.
Resources:
About design futures, organisational change and policy-making
This is continuing that thought on gov teams, and setting up the UCL MPA Dan co-leads.
For those who asked specific questions about cities, more-than-human or indigenous topics, here are specific links. Compared to the links above, these are more exploratory pieces, in the Slowdown Papers, reflecting on Covid, BLM etc, but probably of interest: