To design good services, I…
have humility
participatory design | community engagement empathic design
The lesson: Accept that you don’t fully know things. Humble yourself to the knowledge of others' lived experience.
Work products:
Final report - Opportunities to Improve DC’s Housing Voucher program
I spoke about this project’s participatory design at Code for America’s Find Your Summit sessions–recording
These products are deliverables that I played a significant role in producing, but the final product is the result of collaboration with colleagues because service design is a team sport.
The backstory: In 2022 and 2023, DC got funding to provide more than 5,000 new permanent supportive housing vouchers to residents–the largest ever two-year increase. To give you a sense of scale, the District usually adds about 200-300 new housing vouchers each year. Like the name implies, these vouchers permanently cover about 70% of an individual or a family’s private market rent provided they remain eligible. It is an essential tool in the city for addressing chronic homelessness. But DC Government couldn’t get these vouchers out the door as fast as the demand. Our administrative infrastructure was never built for this volume—a volume that increased by 700% in the span of two years.
Before my team jumped into discovery work, we made a bold pitch to our agency partners–let's hire community members with lived experience of the voucher program to be part of our research and design team. They went for it and we brought on five Resident Researchers—community members with housing vouchers. Together, we designed and led focus groups, interviews, shadows, and co-design sessions ultimately co-authoring a report to prioritize next steps for District leaders.
This was my first venture into participatory design. It was humbling. But the work was better for it. It forced me to admit what I didn’t know, nor could I think to ask. I don’t know what it’s like to:
… be evicted
… be behind on rent
… stay in a shelter
… have to share deeply personal details of my life with a case worker
… face housing discrimination
… be disrespected by government staff
Photo credit: The Lab @ DC
But the Resident Researchers I worked with did. We had tough conversations about these experiences. When the voucher process laid out by government staff didn’t mirror the process our Residents went through, they told us about deviations. It pushed my team to investigate further. And when we got to the ideation and decision stage, our solutions were richer because they were made together with those it would impact.