zen design labs
Before you can change a system, you have to understand it.
For creative studios and organizations where the complexity of the work has outpaced the structures holding it.
Practice
Four areas of practice for creative studios and organizations at inflection points. Research & Organizational Listening is where most engagements begin — a contained scope that surfaces what the system is actually doing before anything gets designed.
01
Research & Organizational Listening
Before you design the fix, understand the system. I run structured listening tours and primary research for creative studios and organizations — surfacing what the data can't explain, what the analytics can't capture, and what the culture has adapted around but never named. You leave with a more precise problem statement and a team that knows what it's actually dealing with.
Listening tours · stakeholder synthesis · research design · qualitative methods
02
Facilitation & Culture Work
A workshop is an interface. I design sessions that leave rooms with something they own: working agreements, design principles, shared language, a changed way of operating. I also take on embedded engagements as a change holder, working inside a creative studio as the human layer that keeps teams grounded while the work happens.
Workshop design · design principles · embedded culture work · team health · inclusive practice
03
Immersive Team Retreats
Some change can't happen in a conference call or a half-day workshop. I design and facilitate off-site experiences for creative leadership teams at inflection points: intensive, designed encounters that create conditions for conversations that wouldn't happen otherwise. I'm currently developing this work and accepting a limited number of pilot engagements.
Off-site design · leadership retreats · team experiences · creative organizations
04
AI & Creative Sovereignty
AI is changing creative work faster than most studios can absorb it. I help creative teams and knowledge-led organizations meet that transformation with integrity — not just which tools to adopt, but how to build sovereignty over your data, your process, and your creative decision-making. I also do community education on disrupting big tech through open, data-sovereign infrastructure.
AI readiness · workflow design · data sovereignty · team training · community education
Selected Work
Case studies across research, facilitation, and design — each from a different context, together telling a consistent story about how this practice works.
Harvard × Superfriendly
Designing a Practice That Outlasts the Workshop
Six sessions, six participants, one living playbook the team still owns. The interface was a room. The product was a changed way of working.
An Inclusive Design Playbook the Harvard team owns, runs, and extends — designed to outlast the engagement.
Calendly
Building Durable Infrastructure Inside an Organization That Won't Hold Still
56 components, 112 designers and engineers, high turnover, no dedicated PM — a system adopted in its first year because it was designed to be embedded rather than imposed.
56-component system adopted in year one by 112 designers and engineers at a 2,000-person company in hyper-growth.
Methodology
Listening Before You Intervene
A methodology essay on structured listening as a diagnostic for systemic dysfunction — how position-based sampling surfaces the patterns that conventional research misses.
Applied across 6+ organizations since 2019. The methodology behind ZDL's research practice.
Practice Notes
What the Room Holds
On the somatic and transformative justice roots of this facilitation practice — and what's different about holding space when the stakes are real.
About
I'm Zen Lara, a designer, researcher, and facilitator. I've built design systems at Calendly, written facilitation curriculum with Harvard, and developed the listening methodology that anchors this practice. I'm also trained in somatic practice and transformative justice facilitation — disciplines that shape how I hold the room when the work is real.
Full background →How It Works
Transformation work is high-stakes and hard to evaluate from the outside. Here's what working together looks like.
- 01
We talk
A 30-minute conversation to understand what you're navigating and whether there's a fit. No pitch, no package: just a real conversation about the situation.
- 02
I scope the work
A proposed approach calibrated to what you actually need. I scope from the problem you're facing, and the shape of the work follows from there.
- 03
We work together
Research, facilitation, or embedded support, with regular synthesis so you know where we are and what's shifting. We're always building toward something you own after I leave.
Work Together
Working on something with real complexity? I’d like to hear about it.