Rosenverse

This video is only accessible to Gold members. Log in or register for a free Gold Trial Account to watch.

Log in Register

Most conference talks are accessible to Gold members, while community videos are generally available to all logged-in members.

Ops without Designers
Gold
Wednesday, November 7, 2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Share the love for this talk
Link:

Summary

Science orgs typically lack designers and for good reason; there is no product. The focus is on data. The currency is discovery. Why spend money on a designer when we need to buy a new microscope? So how do we create a better experience through design for science? In this talk, Mark will outline his approach to operationalizing design in science orgs, first in CERN and now at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory.

Key Insights

  • Scientific organizations like CERN and EMBL operate without profit motives and measure success through published research, not product delivery.

  • Leadership in these organizations is bottom-up, lacking top-down yearly objectives or strict product roadmaps.

  • Research groups are siloed and protected due to external funding and the priority of uninterrupted scientific work.

  • Many digital creators in scientific organizations don’t identify as designers, requiring a broader definition of design teams.

  • EMBL estimated about 500 people across 200 teams are effectively designers despite not holding that title.

  • The philosophy of marginal gains, popularized by Dave Brailsford, drives continuous small improvements across systems.

  • Bruce Lee’s idea that fixed patterns can't adapt to reality inspires an adaptable, experimental approach to organizational change.

  • Design ops success comes from working with existing organizational culture rather than trying to impose new frameworks.

  • Committees, though often ineffecitve in other contexts, are essential to debate and scrutiny in scientific organizations.

  • Effective communication is critical; repeating key messages is the core of managing design ops in complex, decentralized environments.

Notable Quotes

"In science, success is publishing. The product isn’t the output; a Nature paper is."

"The organization is bottom up. There’s no top down hierarchical guidance on where things should go."

"People making digital things here often don’t call themselves designers, but they are designers to us."

"We went from a handful of designers to about 500 overnight, by redefining who a designer is."

"If we make tiny little inconsequential changes across the whole system, they aggregate to better outcomes."

"My job is 90% saying the same thing over and over and over again."

"Committees never work, but in this context, they are how debate and scrutiny happen."

"We have to go with organization culture instead of against it, and see what sticks."

"User researchers can’t be called researchers here, because scientists are researchers already."

"Who is a designer anyway? If we think differently about that, we can think differently about design ops."

Ask the Rosenbot
Jemma Ahmed
Bringing together market and user research (Videoconference)
2019 • Advancing Research Community
Liz Ebengo
The Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Natalia Radywyl
Co-Designing New Power in Australia's Public Sector
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Rachel Posman
"Ask Me Anything" with Rachel Posman and John Calhoun, Authors of the Upcoming Rosenfeld Book, The Design Conductors
2024 • DesignOps 2024
Gold
Jemma Ahmed
Theme 2 Intro
2024 • Enterprise Experience 2020
Gold
Civic Design in 2022 (Videoconference)
2022 • Civic Design Community
Dane DeSutter
Keeping the Body in Mind: What Gestures and Embodied Actions Tell You That Users May Not
2024 • Advancing Research 2024
Gold
Jennifer Bolduc
What's involved with getting people back to work?: A panel discussion (Videoconference)
2021 • DesignOps Community
Kyria Stephens
Power to Heal: Civic Design in the Aftermath of Tragedy
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Davis Neable
How to Drive a Design Project When you Don’t Have a Design Team
2021 • Design at Scale 2021
Gold
Robin Beers
How to create actionable insight in the face of politics and silos [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Christopher Noessel
AI of the now: Designing for Agents
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Frances Yllana
D.E.A.R.R. Diaries (Discipline, Experience, Architecture, Reflection + Revolution)
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Tricia Wang
The most popular design thinking strategy is BS (Videoconference)
2022 • Enterprise Community
Kate Stern
Scaling Learning for the Future
2022 • DesignOps Summit 2022
Gold
Jennifer Strickland
Adopting a "Design By" Method
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold

More Videos

Zariah Cameron

"Denying the body is not an antidote to the suffering of the world. When we protect our rest, we protect our dreaming."

Zariah Cameron

ReDesigning Wellbeing for Equitable Care in the Workplace

September 23, 2024

John Cutler

"Ownership means belonging to the person who anticipates, observes, or monitors the prioritization process—not distributed ownership."

John Cutler Harry Max

Prioritization for designers and product managers (1st of 3 seminars) (Videoconference)

June 13, 2024

Nick Cochran

"Design is a way of organizing complexity or finding clarity in chaos."

Nick Cochran

Growing in Enterprise Design through Making Connections

June 3, 2019

Deanna Smith

"Feedback is data; sometimes there are outliers, so it’s important to understand if feedback reflects the majority."

Deanna Smith

Leading Change with Confidence: Strategies for Optimizing Your Process

September 23, 2024

Magdalena Zadara

"We’re now looking to help legislators think about digital outcomes as they draft new laws and regulations."

Magdalena Zadara

Zero Hour: How to Get Far Quickly When Starting Your Digital Service Unit Late

November 16, 2022

Nova Wehman-Brown

"We didn’t exploit the knowledge gap. Everyone was willing to say I don’t know. Can you help me?"

Nova Wehman-Brown

We've Never Done This Before

June 4, 2019

Liwei Dai

"We human researchers can help go way beyond proxy metrics such as button clicks and provide true validation of model accuracy."

Liwei Dai

The Heart and Brain of the AI Research

March 31, 2020

Gordon Ross

"The Digital Response Unit was a source of situational awareness and air traffic control within the flurry of daily COVID case counts and policy decisions."

Gordon Ross

12 Months of COVID-19 Design and Digital Response with the British Columbia Government

December 8, 2021

Tutti Taygerly

"People will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

Tutti Taygerly

Make Space to Lead

June 12, 2021