alden burke  


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Service Design Portfolio


Human-Centered Design: Discovery and Sense Making

As a Design Educator at The Lab @ OPM, I worked on a small team to write a new version of our introductory course on human-centered design for civil servants.
Course Details

Foundational elements of human-centered design include centering real people; generating ideas to address challenges; and test and refining those ideas to ensure they address people’s needs.

This 2-day course (4 hours each day), focuses on the foundational element of centering people, and touches briefly on generating and testing ideas. A follow-up course will focus on Prototyping and Testing. Civil servants will learn by analyzing examples of major federal projects that leverage people-centered research to generate insights that can power more effective and equitable service delivery. They will also learn by starting small and using components of the same human-centered approach to address challenges in their own work.

Learning goals
  • Analyze high-impact human-centered design work in a federal context in order to understand opportunities afforded by a design approach
  • Understand the role of design in government service delivery
  • Understand how discovery research centers the needs, experiences, and emotions of people (as opposed to systems and organizations), and practice applying discovery research methods
  • Understand how sensemaking can generate insights that lead to new ideas for how to design experiences, and practice applying sensemaking methods
  • Understand and apply methods for framing problems in order to address the right challenge, disrupt biases, and expand the range of possible solutions
  • Understand, develop, and apply design criteria that align with opportunities and constraints for the project
  • Understand the purpose of testing ideas in a human-centered design process




The tools, methods, and mindsets covered in this course are broadly applicable to any internal or public-facing government project or service. With this foundation, learners can move on to the Lab’s separate courses on idea generation, prototyping, and testing to address clearly defined challenges.


Instructional Methodology








The instructional approach for the course was grounded in the gradual release model of teaching.

First participants read and critically examined rigorous examples of real-world, high-impact service design artifacts. In this case, we focused on the journey maps and research produced as part of the government-wide customer experience work on “Recovering From a Disaster.”

See the Performance.gov archive here. Note that the Recovering from a Disaster materials were created for a separate project prior to my time at The Lab @ OPM.






Facilitators then model practical methods using examples from those rigorous artifacts.

Facilitators then scaffold support for participants to practices those methods in a whole-group setting where they can get feedback.










Finally participants practice the methods in small-group settings in breakout teams. They focus on a realistic but fictionalized design prompt. This allows them to practice methods like discovery interviews and problem with one another in a low-risk setting. With this practice and the models and methods in hand, they are equipped to try the methods in their daily work.













The course, facilitated in MURAL, encouraged participants to think critically about the kinds of change they might make, and how feasable it would be to impliment.  

We designed the tools specifically so that participants could re-purpose them in other areas of their work.