Context

As a small (but mighty) team of designers, the Service Design Studio wanted to create different ways for the 300,000 city employees to engage with our team and our methods.

The Service Design Studio designed, produced, and currently manage a suite of design trainings, workshops, and products crafted specifically for public servants.

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My role

Expanding our reach
As a founding member of our team, I helped develop our capacity building offerings as a key pillar of our work. Being such a small team meant we had a very limited capacity for project work. Our Office Hours, Workshops, and Trainings allowed us to reach and empower more public servants excited to work in new ways.

In the early days of the Studio, these offerings also helped build a buzz about our work across city government, and were a key driver for new partnership opportunities.

Evolving to meet demand
I worked closely with my partner Design Lead to create and evolve our offerings based on what was working (or not) and what new demands we were hearing from public servants. For example:

  • We stood up our Office Hours program to meet early excitement and demand for our services, giving people a formal touchpoint to engage with our team in a light-weight way. Like a first-date with design.

  • Office Hours participants told us they wanted more hands-on experience, so we developed a half-day Service Design 101 training and facilitation guide.

  • Office Hours and Workshop participants who were excited at the idea of using design methods felt the content in our Tools + Tactics was not enough to help them take the next step in their work. So our team iterated on our Tools + Tactics content to make it more detailed, action-oriented, and filled with real-world examples of design working inside city government.

Train the trainer
Our training participants were energized by journey mapping, and many of them came back to ask us to facilitate journey mapping sessions for their teams or agency leaders. We developed a journey mapping workshop that we’ve honed over time, until it became more or less plug and play. We are still running these workshops when asked, but have also created a train the trainer facilitation guide to empower public servants to run journey mapping workshops at their own agencies.

Our team’s capacity building activities

 

Weekly Office Hours for public servants to come and chat with us about a project or simply get an introduction to service design.

Service Design 101 workshops where attendees spend a half-day working through the design process on a real-life policy or program.

Journey Mapping workshop for teams to recenter around user experience and generate alignment about current state experiences or map out a vision for the future.

Civic Service Design Tools + Tactics designed and written for public servants but available to anyone interested in learning about design methods and how to apply them in the public sector.

A How-to guide for setting up Office Hours in the public sector, including a white-labeled Airtable CRM to track participants, projects, and needs. 

Design Champion program to celebrate public servants using design in their work and show others what’s possible.

Civic Design Forums to regularly convene public servants in and around NYC to share, learn, and build our community of practice.

 

Engagement at scale

Our small team has been able to provide consistent light-touch design support for public servants, while growing the city’s community of practice for designers and design-champions across city government.

261  office hours engaging 545 unique public servants

25 trainings and workshops for 154 unique participants

16 Design Champions

813 Civic Design Forum RSVPs