gabi

Challenge

How might we design and implementa “test & learn” approach for deploying economic mobility interventions across a wide range of local contexts? Behavioral Insights Team (BIT) contracted our team at Idea Couture to help rollout a new economic mobility initiative that would support disadvantaged communities in 10 cities in researching, identifying, designing and testing a new service intervention.

My Role

As the lead design researcher at Idea Couture, I helped to define the overarching service design process, design the research activities and co-create the deliverables.  

Outcome

Before we could even engage the cities we knew our small but mighty team could not directly support each of the 10 cities on our own in the limited time available. We needed a way to build in-house capacity for these service design projects.

We designed an overarching service design process that could be adapted and replicated to serve all 10 cities—led by the Behavioral Insights Team and adopted by the city representatives. Alongside this process we produced a playbook for our partners and participating cities, led a bootcamp to teach our partners the different research and design methods included in the playbook, and ran a rapid prototyping workshop for the participating city representatives to learn simple ways to continue to test and refine their services.

What I loved about this work was not just being able to work on a project with real social impact, but we were able to find new ways to conduct research with diverse, disadvantaged communities, and support our partners in continuing to take human-centered design approaches to their work.