In most participatory projects, customers are brought in at certain points to do certain activities. Instead, our customers and employees are always present and leading. They are full-fledged members of the design team, and they lead the process, choosing the methodologies. There are no calls, planning, debriefing, interpretation, or evaluation apart from them because they are the team.
In most participatory design projects, the professionals, experts, or designers facilitate and lead the process from their expertise and mainstream, institutional knowledge. In this project, we prioritize the embodied, relational, community, lived experiential knowledge above mainstream institutional knowledge about service design. The community members lead and choose the methodology from their own ways of being, knowing, and doing.
The customers and employees own the data, outcomes, and artifacts, as well as the narratives of the data, outcomes, and artifacts.

The project is ongoing at NASA, building on the learnings of the participatory customer and employee teams and continuing to redesign the service and evaluate outcomes.

The focus is now policy design at the systems level across the entire government, to enable other projects to overcome barriers we faced when trying to do RPD. I joined a policy accelerator fellowship and published a policy memo on radical participation and shared it with the White House. They thought it was visionary but were unwilling to implement it yet. So I am now in the policy entrepreneurship phase working on 3 projects. I have started a participatory design and equity Community of Practice in government. I am building a portfolio or list of participatory projects to return to the White House to show the growing community. I’m working to launch an annual participatory government awards in 2024 to both highlight the participatory work of some in government and to encourage more people to work in this way.

As an economic development project focused on small companies, we worked alongside citizens and owners of small companies, especially women-owned and minority-owned businesses, so that their lived experience led the project. We also wanted the participation and experience of front-line government officials and staff who experience role stress and deliver services to the businesses. We conducted interviews with CSOs who helped advise us based on their economic development experience.

Government staff improved their employee experience and satisfaction. Some were offered new jobs based on skills gained during the participatory project.
Owners of and citizens in small companies, experience increased revenue and viability by redesigning the service with improved recruitment, awareness, targeted participation, and transitions.
Investors can better conduct due diligence of awardees and find small technology companies to invest in.
Researchers improved business skills.

The impact was increased equity, greater awareness and participation of women-owned and minority-owned small businesses and minority-serving institutions. We built an innovation platform with an actionable, decision-making CX/EX dashboard, infusing equity into our CX/EX equations; an experimentation culture; a trimesterly learning program infusing service design across the org (a service design book club, an internal innovation learning program with 4.8/5 CSAT, etc.); outcome-based performance plans; 4.8/5.0 helpdesk CSAT and EX; a program strategy; 100% uptime of our service; reduced proposal submission errors to 1%; doubled program awareness of underrepresented groups; halved Phase 1 evaluation times; 9.1/10 portfolio selection EX; etc.

The program provided no staff. So I used a participatory approach of customers/employees requesting 40% employee time. The program had no program strategy. So we built a CX/EX strategy for our work while advocating for program strategy. When the program strategy was built, we aligned our CX/EX strategy to it. Data, product, CX, design, and innovation literacies were low. We addressed this by building educational initiatives including book clubs, lunch ‘n’ learns, talks, work-alongs, working in the open, transparently sharing our work etc. Also, leadership did not define nor measure success due to fear of failure. We simply modeled a data-driven and honest culture and are still working on this. We moved more slowly due to availability.

Leadership support is critical. Leaders must be willing to let go, allow customers and employees to lead from their lived experience, and avoid reversing team decisions. A way to pay customers equitably for their time is crucial. Policies and contracting that allow this are helpful. A method to reduce the workload of employees so they can participate is needed for employee participatory teams working on employee experience. Ultimately a willingness to learn must exist or grow across the organization experimenting with this way of working. Lastly, due to customer and employee availability, an org must be willing to move at a slower pace for participatory work compared to the pace of a hired consultant team.

There are projects in governments that involve some level of participation. I have not seen radical participation, though, in the U.S. federal government. This can be replicated, though, by policy design at the system level to help others across government. I published a policy memo on RPD in government which I shared with the White House. I am now building a portfolio of examples to encourage the White House to enact the policy memo requiring all government policy, products, and services to be created using PD. I have started a PD Community of Practice, and I’m designing an annual Participatory Government Projects awards to launch in 2024 to increase awareness and encourage more people to create policy, products, and services in this way.

The main work is advocacy. If you can advocate to work in this way, you have already succeeded. The focus here is making the process equitable. Equitable outcomes will be an outcome of equitable processes. Avoid going from no participation to radical participation. Just ask yourself one question. What one thing can I change on my project to make it more participatory than it is or than my last project? Then do that one thing. Asking this repeatedly moves you in the direction of radicality. The point isn’t to arrive at radical participation in one step. The point is to always be moving in that direction.

Use RPD to test an assumption. Test RPD on an EX project first (leaders are more willing). Use failed projects. Build a portfolio of tiny project examples that leaders may not care strongly about. Choose the right-sized project that will build credibility but is not tightly controlled. Tie RPD to the bottom line and show the ROI. Focus on design outcome when advocating. Try the 5 Whys technique to ask why leaders want something and then ask if it’s ok if you deliver it using a different method. Use analogies like cooking (even though there are professional chefs, many people cook and can teach about their cooking without being a chef). Work to institutionalize RPD in your work so it doesn’t matter if leaders change.