📍 Project Overview
As part of my graduate work in Design Thinking, I led a strategic initiative to reframe a perceived spatial problem—an uninspiring, underutilized collaboration space—into a deeper exploration of organizational decision-making culture. Through stakeholder interviews, contextual inquiry, and workshop facilitation, I uncovered root issues around exclusion, misalignment, and lack of stakeholder voice in company decisions.
- Role: Researcher, Strategist, Workshop Facilitator
- Duration: 4 weeks
- Tools Used: Empathy Mapping, Stakeholder Mapping, Frame Creation, System Usability Scale (SUS), Affinity Clustering, Rapid Prototyping
- Focus: Organizational Change, Employee Voice, Participatory Strategy
❓ Initial Problem
The project began with a spatial question:
“How might we create an inspiring space for collaboration that reflects our company’s vision?”
However, stakeholder interviews revealed that the room was only a symptom of a broader issue: top-down decision making that consistently excluded employees and led to unpopular, ineffective outcomes.
🔄 Reframed Challenge
How might we listen to employees and create an egalitarian environment for decision making?
🔍 Key Research Insights
Through interviews, contextual inquiry, and informal conversations, I uncovered several themes:
- Leadership Misalignment: The current decision-making culture excluded both non-shareholders and key user groups.
- Broken UX of Space: The room was aesthetically “nice,” but lacked purpose, flexibility, or inclusiveness—mirroring the company’s org design.
- Us vs. Them Culture: There was a clear divide between executive leadership and everyday employees, reinforced by physical layout and communication silos.
- Missed Opportunities for Co-Creation: UX professionals and frontline workers were not consulted before decisions that affected their work.
“There are three distinct spaces for three different classes of people—it’s symbolic of how we work.”
🛠️ Workshop Design & Implementation
I designed a participatory workshop that would bring together an equal number of executives, shareholders, and non-shareholder employees to collaboratively redesign the company’s decision-making model.
🧩 Workshop Structure:
- Pre-Workshop Research
- Empathy Mapping
- Problem Tree Analysis
- Contextual Inquiry
- SUS evaluation of the existing space
- Workshop Activities
- Stakeholder Mapping
- Critique & Alternative Worlds
- Ideation Sessions
- Affinity Clustering
- Visual Voting
- Post-Workshop Prototyping
- Schematic Diagramming
- Rapid Prototyping of decision-making frameworks
- Think-Aloud Testing
- Final SUS feedback loop
📦 Intended Deliverables
- New Decision-Making Framework: Includes stakeholder checkpoints, defined recourse for poor decisions, and shared ownership models.
- Litmus Test Protocol: A tool to evaluate alignment between company vision and proposed decisions.
- Key KPIs: Defined criteria to measure the success and inclusivity of leadership actions.
💡 Intended Outcomes & Impact
- Foster cross-hierarchy conversations that haven’t previously happened
- Surface latent organizational tension and translate it into actionable frameworks
- Create a replicable workshop model that can be adapted for future culture-change initiatives
🔁 Reflections
This project reaffirmed a core principle of my design practice: spatial problems often reveal systemic ones. What began as a conversation about architecture evolved into a call for structural equity, deeper listening, and design leadership that centers real users—internal and external.
“If you don’t include the right people in decisions, the environment will always feel wrong—even if it looks good.”
