project / Harvard × Superfriendly
the workshop ends. the practice stays.
With Harvard Business School’s Digital Initiative, I designed a learning experience around what the team could keep doing after the sessions ended.
what was built
six sessions. one team-owned playbook.
Working through Superfriendly alongside David Dylan Thomas, I helped translate inclusive design from an intention into exercises, shared language, and tools the team could use in its own work.
- 6
- connected sessions
- 6
- participants
- 1
- living playbook
design for the day after the workshop.
The brief was to keep inclusive design alive when no outside facilitator was in the room. That meant designing for ordinary working moments: questioning a metric, noticing whose voice is missing, or challenging an assumption in a review.
I joined through Superfriendly as lead facilitator, designer, and coach, collaborating with David Dylan Thomas, author of Design for Cognitive Bias. His work on cognitive bias helped establish the shared vocabulary the program built on.
learn it. try it on real work.
Six connected sessions built toward a practice the team could own. Each introduced something the group could use in the next session—and in the decisions already on their desks.
session 1
Notice bias
Build a shared vocabulary for bias in content, metrics, and design assumptions.
session 2
Make a commitment
Translate inclusive design values into specific commitments tied to the team’s projects.
session 3
Map power and community
Look at who is centered, who is affected, and who has a say.
session 4
Stay with the problem
Use problem framing to understand a situation before deciding what to build.
session 5
Practice on a real project
Apply journey mapping, prioritization, and lo-fi wireframes to the DI People Page.
session 6
Make it repeatable
Gather the team’s language, exercises, and decision frameworks into a living playbook.
the artifact was a way back in.
The Inclusive Design Playbook collected the principles and frameworks this team arrived at through the work. It included bias-informed principles, ethical research methods, power and community mapping, and ways to keep commitments visible in everyday decisions.
I designed it to be useful without a facilitator: structured enough to return to, specific enough to help, and open enough for the team to adapt. A person who missed the sessions should still have a way into the practice.
what this work clarified for me.
The team’s curriculum and playbook were built around its own work. I designed them to support continued use, teaching, and adaptation.
That question now sits at the center of ZDL: what will this team be able to notice, discuss, and do together when I’m no longer in the room?
from my practice
design for the moment you won’t be there.
Teach a practice, give people a way to return to it, and leave room for them to make it their own.
a place to begin
what does your team want to get better at?
Bring a real decision, tension, or recurring situation. We can explore what a repeatable practice might make possible.
let’s talk ↗