It was certainly an honor to help get more people registered to vote. Check out the work (and register if you haven't yet) at vote.gov.
Check out opportunity.census.gov
and a pretty cool Wired article here:
https://www.wired.com/2016/03/white-house-wants-build-tech-tools-data/
In progress, stay tuned :)
In the meantime, check out a cool write up here
Worker.gov is a site dedicated to helping workers understand and exercise their rights. It is currently in beta and would love your feedback!
While I feel so lucky to have embarked on many really rewarding adventures, redesigning the patient experience is atop the list. Health is one of the most personal elements of one's being. And to stay engaged in one's health while hitting walls or realizing its challenges can be so difficult.
Our team set out to reimagine the patient experience and create meaningful interactions (whether those be environment, digital, product, or service oriented). We used design thinking, service design, and a host of other techniques, in our creative process.
The hope was not just that experiences can change one's perception of the health care they are receiving, but also their perception of their own health.
Great experiences really do drive engagement - just think about how often you engage with your favorite experiences - from Disneyland to Uber.
And what better to be truly engaged in than your own health?
*This project is subject to proprietary/confidentiality clauses that restrict the ability to go into more detail
There are few things more exciting to me than spreading the design thinking ethos. And one of the best ways to do this for me has been the design and delivery of workshops and training events.
These events are specifically designed and customized for clients based on their needs and goals. They are typically include facilitation as well. Some of my favorites include:
- response to natural disasters with an emphasis on those with special needs
- organizational design and strategy session with leaders of financial unit
- service storming the airport experience
- internship programs
- reimagining learning and training experiences
- lego serious play sessions
Facilitation is one of my favorite ways to experience the creative process. Ultimately, I think, because by the end of every session there is inevitably someone who has a renewed faith in their creative ability.
I have been lucky to facilitate sessions around an array of topics, some of my favorite being:
- response to natural disasters with an emphasis on those with special needs
- organizational design and strategy session with leaders of financial unit
- service storming the airport experience
- internship programs
- reimagining learning and training experiences
- lego serious play sessions
Visualizing the emotional pulse of our communities.
Inspired by the wayfinding power of maps and the raw, uninhibited power of emotion, I set out to harness and combine these two opposite forces in the hopes of helping people wayfind self-awareness.
User-driven content soon became essential to the project. So, my inspirational sherpas soon became people like Candy Chang, and projects like the Tidy Street Project and the recent user-driven art in Ferguson.
It has been quite a journey so far. I tried to help people express their emotions by way of words, colors, drawings, shapes, through the relationship with the physical. I tested mediums of markers, paints, chalk, movement, temperature, space, time.
I learned that emotions are really hard to express. And people don't really like to explicitly make the choice to express them. Even weirder, we seem to not be given the tools to express our emotions. I became fascinated with how much weight our emotions seem to play in our decision making but how little we want to admit they do.
My initial instinct was to create a conduit for those emotions to become something discrete. But as the journey progressed, I noticed that it was sometimes easier for people to stay in the abstract when trying to express something abstract rather than try to express it in a form that seemed unnatural to them. I chose graffiti.
There was something inherently rebellious about graffiti that I really liked.
That said, there was a barrier to use with this method. It seemed to be almost too much for some people to express emotion And graffiti.
People would walk by and say, 'can I do this?' to their friends or 'is this public art?' to the sky. Then others would just jump right in and spray and walk away. So who knows. At the very least, I was happy as I sat overhearing people walk by saying things like, 'well, before exams my feelings look like shit but after they look great'. It was starting not only the interruption but the conversation.
I'm excited to say that there are neighborhoods in both Baltimore and DC that are talking about a pilot installation and I'm really looking forward to developing this further.
More to come...
#pulse
I had the great fortune of leading a team in reimagining employee engagement within a large, financial business unit on this project.
I coached three folks through the design thinking process while we made our way through ethnographic research, synthesis of that data, ideating new solutions, and prototyping those quickly.
While I was overjoyed at the opportunity to create meaningful solutions for employees and find ways to better engage them in their work, it was honestly just as rewarding to see my three teammates grow as design thinkers and flourish in their creative confidence. We even went to the zoo to reframe a little and get a zookeeper's thoughts on how they understand the needs of their animals, nonverbally communicate, and serve those needs.
Update: happy to report 7 of 9 recommendations from this project are currently in implementation!
*This project is subject to proprietary/confidentiality clauses that restrict the ability to go into more detail
Just a place to keep my musings in expression and exploration
