Invite the rest of your team to see past the tip of the iceberg — For most product teams, sharing early-stage designs isn’t ground-breaking at all. But at my department within the Government of Canada—where some of us are quietly working to show decision-makers the transformative value of Design—it can take near resilience to propose and then lead a design crit. For all the empathy…

I’m an educational technology coach who practices human-centred design at AlphaPlus, working with adult literacy organizations across Ontario to build organizational capacity related to digital tools and technology. …

When designing for complex systems, try subtracting and slowing down — Growing up, I was told an age-old Chinese fable story with a moral that I haven’t been able to forget since. A group of students entered an artistic competition and were asked to draw a snake in a given time frame. One student, clearly the most talented of them all, finished early. With all the spare time on his hands, he launched into polishing the snake with extra details, extra features…

A context for experimentation and a yearning to grow a service design culture in community-based learning organizations — Service design is a new experiment at AlphaPlus, a support agency for some 290+ Literacy and Basic Skills (LBS) programs funded by the Government of Ontario. What service design does is help companies and organizations to better understand all the parts of their delivery to and relationship with customers and…

Exploring the idea of a new platform for sharing best practices in educational planning & management — This article was inspired by an exploratory note commissioned to me in 2019 on “New Trends in Educational Planning” by the IIEP-UNESCO. The views represented here engage only me. “Educational planning, in its broadest generic sense, is the application of rational, systematic analysis to the process of educational development with…

The unexpected journey that has made me more intentional, thoughtful, and self-aware as a designer — As the title of this article indicates, I currently design for a non-design-led, not-for-profit organization. But a decade ago, I dreamed of something very different. When my older brother was offered his first role at Microsoft 10 years ago, I quickly fell prey to the charms of joining a FAAMG…

A golden opportunity to do permissionless UX and experience design where it really matters — There aren’t many of us out there. The data probably shows some outliers. I’m one of them: a young designer who chose to join a small, government-funded non-profit—and trying to build my career in it. To be honest, it’s not easy. I’m carving out a new path. But I’m fortunate…

Why I lament the lack of our online presence — and how we can easily fix that — A month ago, I made the leap from management consulting to working for an outstanding non-profit organization in Toronto, Canada with an amazing mission. The vast majority of the funding we receive from the Government of Ontario is directed towards providing support, services and programs to those covered by our…

Some thoughts after completing an 100% online full-time UX diploma program during COVID — As fate would have it, I stumbled into UX Design, just months before COVID-19 grew into global pandemic. In March 2020, a few weeks after I’d made up my mind to leave my full-time job in the City of Lights for UX and we’d heroically told my in-laws we were…