Creating the Conditions for Co-design to Thrive

If you want government services built with care, you need to invest in systems and people that make care work routine. 

Founded in 2019, the Colorado Digital Service (CDS) helps agencies across the state to “design, build, and buy sustainable technologies that help Coloradans thrive.” Over the past five years, CDS has embedded small, expert teams directly into state agencies like the Department of Motor Vehicles and the Department of Health Care Policy & Financing to modernize systems, streamline processes, and improve how Coloradans experience government services.

As part of that work, designers at CDS like Mina Farzad have been building infrastructure to make human-centered design a routine part of Colorado government operations. CDS is creating the operational and cultural foundation for human-centered design to thrive as a permanent part of Colorado government. 

responding to demand

While many states are still introducing the idea of user research to their agencies, Colorado has seen a different challenge: responding to the high demand for human-centered design support from agencies. According to Farzad, design terminology that used to be unfamiliar is now part of the regular vocabulary of many state leaders. 

“Over the past two years, we really have seen a snowball effect of one really great project being seen by folks in another part of the state, and someone over there saying ‘we really could use this,’” Farzad said. “I’ve been fascinated with how much folks will actually come to us and say service blueprinting or service design or talk to us about customer archetypes.

Beyond seeing success in neighboring agencies, Farzad credits the national community of civic designers at all levels of government with raising awareness about this type of work and creating the conditions for it to thrive in new places. That work has both inspired Colorado agencies to seek guidance from CDS and has helped CDS design its own practices and methods. 

“We really learned from our peers at the federal level and in places like Philadelphia with their Equitable Community Engagement Tool Kit and folks like the New York City Service Design Studio,” Farzad said. 

Part of what CDS has learned from peer organizations is the importance of clearing paths and setting up systems to support the fundamental methods of co-design. 

finding and compensating users

While budgets, hiring, and procurement are frequent challenges to human-centered design in government, design teams cite two smaller, more persistent challenges to their work: finding users and compensating them for their time. 

A core tenet of human-centered design is talking to actual users of your service or product as part of user research and testing. But connecting with actual users can be difficult, as can finding approved ways to compensate users for the time spent in research sessions, as many government regulations make it difficult to directly pay members of the public.

As is often the case for thorny challenges, CDS found a solution through partnership. The Family Voice Council is an initiative of the Colorado Department of Human Services that brings together people who are current beneficiaries of two or more state programs. The council gathers for monthly sessions where beneficiaries can learn more about state services, and state teams can hear from residents about how programs are functioning. Participants in the Family Voice Council are already compensated for their time, so CDS was able to partner with the Council to use part of their monthly meetings to conduct research on state services with their target user population.

A similar state group called the Community Steering Committee allows CDS and other agencies to conduct user testing with people with a wide range of disabilities and with people who use assistive technology. CDS also works with non-profit organizations, such as the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, to connect with specific user groups,. 

“We are operationalizing design and user research as a practice within our larger central IT organization at the state so that it can be a service that any state agency can use,” Farzad said. “Even if a state agency is bringing in contractors, those contracted designers and researchers have a reliable way to recruit Coloradans of all different kinds and pay those folks for their participation in any kind of user research that they're doing.”

To build on this work, CDS is exploring multiple ways to pay user research participants in an effort to lower the administrative burden for teams looking to do user research. 

using natural intelligence to care for teams 

To build co-design as a sustainable practice for their team, CDS is also investing in the well-being of  their design team members and partners. Farzad said lessons from nature and permaculture have been an inspiration for how to care for team members and support partners in accepting and adapting to change. 

“A healthy system can accept feedback and self-regulate. That's a principle of permaculture, which is a huge inspiration for my work. Healthy ecosystems, healthy technical systems, and healthy social systems can always accept feedback and self-regulate, and those are actually things that individuals can really struggle with,” Farzad said. “If we've got individuals that are struggling with accepting feedback and self-regulating, we're really never going to get to a system that is able to accept feedback and self-regulate and respond to that feedback.”

Internally, this inspiration from natural intelligence has helped the team explore ways to deal with the emotional toll of user research. In government, design research is often focused on aspects of the social safety net, which often centers on people in crisis. 

“We really do talk to folks in their most desperate moments, and are witness to some really, really difficult stuff,” Farzad said. 

Farzad said the team has been exploring “composting rituals” to let go of the weight and stories they no longer need to hold on to so team members can renew themselves and be able to continue the work. They are also intentional in their hiring and look for people with experience with trauma-informed research, both so they can provide safe, humane research environments for participants and so they can build a resilient, caring team. 

“What we've been thinking about in our design practice is how we need to take care of ourselves as the folks who carry that data. Much of our job is to translate that data into a story for an executive or a decision maker to understand. That asks us to carry a lot,” Farzad said.

The CDS team takes the same approach of acknowledging the emotional aspect of HCD work with their agency partners.  

“We're also really conscious of the fact that we're asking folks to use maybe a different part of their brain or a different muscle than they're used to using when they come to work. We acknowledge upfront that this is going to feel vulnerable, and that's okay,” Farzad said. 

what happens when it all comes together

When all of those aspects — the demand for human-centered design from partners, the organizational infrastructure to support regular co-design, and the people support systems that make this work sustainable — come together, it can have a huge impact on the public servants who make change possible.  

“We get to bring a little bit of the original idealism that draws people into public service that can really get kicked out of you over years and years of doing this work. When we say there are design methodologies that we can actually use to solve these problems that you came to government in the first place to fix, we get to see the light come back in their eyes,” Farzad said. 

“For me, that's the most rewarding thing. We see people who are stuck and frustrated. We get to come in and say, all of your instincts about this issue that you've had for years are right, and there’s a way to incorporate the wisdom you've gathered over years of doing this into a process for delivering incremental improvement and better outcomes to the people that you're serving. All of my excitement comes from them getting excited again.”