Rosenverse

Log in or create a free Rosenverse account to watch this video.

Log in Create free account

100s of community videos are available to free members. Conference talks are generally available to Gold members.

Scaling Impact with Service Design (Videoconference)
Thursday, March 25, 2021 • DesignOps Community
Share the love for this talk
Scaling Impact with Service Design (Videoconference)
Speakers: Alison Rand and Sarah Brooks
Link:

Summary

This will be an informal conversation between Alison Rand and Sarah Brooks. We discuss Sarah's experience applying service design and design research in both the public and private sector to create organizational change that delivers positive outcomes to people. We touch on questions of working at different scales, within different types of organizational structures and business models.

Key Insights

  • Design operations increasingly involves service design to scale impact across complex organizations.

  • Sarah's work at the VA showed design's role in transforming bureaucratic culture from compliance to people-centered care.

  • Scaling design impact requires support from both executive leadership and grassroots communities simultaneously.

  • Human-centered design must evolve toward life-centered design, considering ecological systems, not just humans.

  • Early digital tools, like the 2011 Pop Tech iPad app, integrated service design by connecting pre-event, event, and post-event experiences.

  • Large legacy organizations like IBM and the VA share similar challenges around legacy systems and cultural inertia.

  • Storytelling with qualitative data is critical to influencing change in government and large organizations.

  • Facilitation and convening people to collaborate often requires less structure than expected; just creating space is valuable.

  • The Presidential Innovation Fellowship acts as an entrepreneurial bridge between private and public sectors to drive civic design.

  • Experienced designers benefit from having a 'playbook' but must continuously adapt to new contexts and players.

Notable Quotes

"Design operations is really so much about service design."

"Hot Studio’s Maria is considered one of the founding members of design operations."

"Why would you do pro bono social impact work without a sustainable business model?"

"We did journey maps to understand how to connect digital and in-person experiences at Pop Tech."

"You need support from the top down, but that’s not enough; grassroots support is equally critical."

"We were changing people’s relationship with change in a rules-based government culture."

"Storytelling through evidence like videos and printed stories is incredibly valuable for making impact."

"There are still very few Chief Design Officer roles in government agencies."

"People often go along with an outcome if they feel like they were part of the process."

"I’m trying out life-centered design because we live in a biosphere, not just a human world."

Shipra Kayan
How we Built a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Practice at Upwork from the Ground Up
2021 • DesignOps Summit 2021
Gold
Charlotte Lee
Theme 1 Intro
2021 • Civic Design 2021
Gold
Dr. Jamika D. Burge
Bridge Building across Research Disciplines (Videoconference)
2021 • Advancing Research Community
Laura Weiss
Turn Down the Heat: 3 Ways to Handle Conflict in the Moment
2024 • Rosenfeld Community
Operationalizing DesignOps
2018 • DesignOps Summit 2018
Gold
DesignOps and The Great Talent War of 2021 (Videoconference)
2021 • DesignOps Community
Samuel Proulx
Invisible barriers: Why accessible service design can’t be an afterthought
2024 • Advancing Service Design 2024
Gold
Sam Ladner
Methodologies: Beyond the interview [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Robert Fabricant
Industry junctures: Paths forwards for UXR and the critical decisions that get us there [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Catherine Dubut
Bridging Physical and Digital Spaces: Approaches to Retail Service Design (Videoconference)
2021 • Enterprise Community
Shazia Ali
Communication: Innovative techniques for making your voice heard [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series]
2024 • Advancing Research Community
Justin Entzminger
Risk and Reward: How to Diversify the Field of Civic Innovators and Designers
2022 • Civic Design 2022
Gold
Elena Naids
The Power of Difficult Conversations: A Case Study on How We Introduced Design Ops in the Federal Government Space
2023 • DesignOps Summit 2023
Gold
Sarah Alvarado
How to make UX research leadership more effective [Advancing Research Community Workshop Series] (Videoconference)
2023 • Advancing Research Community
Uday Gajendar
Leading through the long tail of trauma (Videoconference)
2022 • Advancing Research Community
Robert Reimann
Taming Design Complexity with UX Models
2017 • Enterprise Experience 2017
Gold

More Videos

Monty Hammontree

"Celebrating learning—especially when invalidating a hypothesis—is a key cultural value we embrace."

Monty Hammontree

The Future of UX Research (Videoconference)

December 3, 2020

Liz Ebengo

"Knowing your positionality as a researcher is critical because refugees often fear losing their status and have precarious rights."

Liz Ebengo

The Burden on Children: The Cost of Insufficient Post-Conflict Services and Pathways Forward

December 4, 2024

Billy Carlson

"Leave your new feature in the context of how people will see it so it’s easy for stakeholders to understand."

Billy Carlson

Tips to Utilize Wireframes to Tell an Effective Product Story

June 6, 2023

Saara Kamppari-Miller

"The better question is who are we excluding when we talk about inclusive design."

Saara Kamppari-Miller

Inclusive Design is DesignOps

September 29, 2021

Ian Swinson

"Knowing your customer and your product inside and out is a given—you can’t design well without that knowledge."

Ian Swinson

Designing and Driving UX Careers

June 8, 2016

Jonathon Colman

"Equal pay for equal results — content designers and product designers at Intercom have the same compensation bands and equity."

Jonathon Colman

How to Maximize the Impact of Content Design

January 8, 2024

Maria Skaaden

"When you do a release, you’re really saying, here’s what I’m thinking: how does this work in your world?"

Maria Skaaden

Continuous Design: One eye on the horizon and the other on the next wave

November 8, 2018

Bryce Benton

"Markdown is a very concise and useful format, and it's used all over the place on GitHub."

Bryce Benton

[Demo] AI-powered UX enhancement: Aligning GitHub documentation with USWDS at Austin Public Library

June 4, 2024

Marc Fonteijn

"The satisfaction score is going down even though average salary is going up — that’s something interesting we should dig into."

Marc Fonteijn

First Insights from the 2025 Service Design Salary(+) Report

December 4, 2024