How my use of design tools reflects my ongoing personal growth

This article is a self-reflection of how I have been deploying and learning different design research tools, in different contexts, to address the problem space in my career from 2015 until now. The underlying journey includes a succession of hiccups, struggles and stops to reframe where my values and behaviours are to deliver a positive evolution for individuals, teams and organisations.

What is the problem? 

The design thinking mindset has been the kick off to propel my creative confidence facing the ambiguity, uncertainty and complexities of designing products and services.

In 2015 during the business design experience at Kingston University, I embraced design research to investigate cultural change in a public organisation in London. The design research paved the way for my empathy skills to distill human needs through observation, listening and questions. As a result of the gathered hybrid data, I delivered recommendations and findings through a workshop. In the same year, we set up a start up to tackle the learning disabilities for children. I was taking responsibility for field studies. In the schools, we were testing, listening and learning the unexpected. The final output was a digital prototype – Once Upon a Wheel – a disc for social stories. By engaging the children in learning, also, it enhanced the understanding of circular stories, provided therapists, nursery teachers, and other professionals with a tool that teaches children what things belong to the same category or how to react when they face a new situation.




Low Fidelity Prototype case with social stories discs ready to be shipped to schools

User Research has become my direction meanwhile, in 2017, I was diving into Service Design as the next expansion to generate service innovation. During consultancy projects, I was injecting service design tools and concepts as alignment with a transition in our economy, from products to services. For example, in 2016 I delivered a business design creative research report where I proposed ‘Blue Ocean strategies’ to scan and integrate organisational management models.


Blue Ocean Strategies Interpretation – 2016

By refining tools and approaches in user experience (UX) research, I have been able to assess and improve the selection of methods to frame realistic contexts and insights to design processes. However, I have begun to face the limits of some tools towards systemic challenges, for example, designing a platform.

In this regard, my practical experience happened in two contexts, both in the early stage of two startups when I moved to Berlin from London. In 2018 with STOKR , a fintech startup that enables a digital marketplace for founders and investors, as contractor, I carried out action research in the pre-launch phase. I identified challenges, goals and context in ventures and investors. These soft-data were to unlock the understanding of the market landscape and enable strategic network partnerships. The field research activity, alternating action and critical thinking, helped to refine data and interpretation about how to onboard business leads connected with the evolution of the business model.

Similarly, with Cobiom – Hyperlink – in 2019, I supported the launch and the design of the platform from its conception. The secondary and primary research unveiled the complexities of the B2B marketplace in sustainability transformation. The challenge was to understand what and who to engage first – the sustainability experts or the companies – to address the problem space. The customer journey mapping was the output of the research activities that unveil the importance of platform strategies. As often I apply my writing skills to document my work and self-reflection, you can read more here. The outcome was that Cobiom might mutate into a market network with multiple layers of services. 

Customer Journey Mapping – Cobiom Platofrm Iterations 2019

Adding Ecosystem Platform thinking to the UX toolkit

In 2020 as the pandemic broke out, I continued with a series of virtual gigs applying service design innovation tools. Most importantly, 2020 made my personal learning journey busier than ever. I learnt the impact of platform economy and strategy thanks to a powerful community of innovators at platform design toolkit. A platform design sprint and the bootcamp equipped me with the necessary strategic awareness to embrace my facilitation skills coupled with the canvases.

As part of the community research experiment with Platform Design Toolkit, we contributed to the new white paper In the research compass – which visualized the evolutionary contexts linked with organisational design trends – I decided to focus on noonsphere, the cultural lense. The output was to investigate further governance innovation tools and decentralized decision making process. Because of the community experience, my mindset augmented the vision of how to explore and investigate a collective need, a systemic change before a specific user problem.



The PDT bootcamp crew 2020

In my quest through the cultural lense, I researched and analysed an organisation that enables governance innovation. An ongoing collaboration with Commons Stack, It offered a territory to further connect my work with Distributed Ledgers Technologies by learning and experimenting governance innovation tools. My work focused on gathering, simplifying and disseminating recommendations to create access to this field. Ecosystem mapping was important to figure out what entity could trigger governance innovation. I interviewed Jeff Emmett from Commons Stack and engaged him in a co-creation process to deliver the workshop, in July 2020, about a decentralized decision making process.

In this cascade of learning-by-doing-activities, between 2020 and early 2021, I joined a digital bootcamp organised by the Future Food Institute. Also, I run my own UX Design project to practice again and learn design tools such as Figma. I designed a prototype for the flight booking process. Here is my ux design portfolio.

Participatory research applied to decentralized governance

In April 2021, at Berchain Token System series, I delivered a talk to investigate governance innovation by combining the token design systemic impact with the potential evolution of platform strategies. With a sense-making approach, I augmented the previous actions with Commons Stack. I interacted with other experts to streamline understanding and facilitate a potential alignment to change governance for the better. The need is clear as much as a demanding journey is required to design tools to facilitate governance innovation. – Read my latest article here.

Organically, my professional serendipity with Commons Stack has evolved with the Token Engineering Commons to investigate governance further. See more here on my youtube channel.

The very latest example of my engagement with communities is happening with SuperCoop in Berlin since May 2021. As an active member, I am supporting the research group by designing surveys to engage, understand and create awareness in the community of 500 members about product sourcing.



Participatory research loops

A spiritual innovation reflection

As my learning curve carries on, it increasingly embeds humans’ needs, at individual and at collective level. My creative engagement is constantly to facilitate how we interpret this complexity along with the environmental impact we experience. Services and products are the projections of those interpretations. We need rivers of sense-making activities. UX Research, Service Design, Platform Strategies must be the orienteering tools to walk into a systemic view while we show each other respect and empathy as guests in the natural world.

Reflecting on the historical impact of the pandemic, I believe that UX, Service Design, Platform strategies, Distributed Ledgers Technologies are tools where our enlightenment needs to come through with awareness of human needs first and foremost. Practicing awareness is to connect our spiritual power with innovation rather than political power, with coercion and exploitative approach.This will change the matrix of competition to cooperation with a structured experimentation along with a never ending learning curve.

I share my work by writing on Medium. On my  YouTube Channel  I share relevant workshop design and facilitation work. More views on Twitter. My website is: www.changetheriver.org