Design at Scale 2021- The Lost Year (Sha Hwang)

—> Thank you to Bria and everyone with the Rosenfeld Media Crew and shout-out to Theme 3 crew and everyone who participated in the conference in the past few days

 

—> Before we start my talk, I have an exercise for you
  • If you are on Slack open up a draft message, if you do not have Slack write a note or an email
—> The exercise is this: I’m going to ask you to think of something small you can do that can give you energy
  • That action can be walking, taking a nap, or answering that email in your inbox
  • Hang onto that thought you have

 

—> Throughout this talk I will touch on heavy topics, however briefly
  • These might be hard things to be reminded of as we’ve been through a lot this year from Covid to the Texas power outages
–>  I’ll also talk about the work Nava does, and how it will inform the work we will ask of you

 

—> So let’s start!

 

—> I’ll start by reminding us of our blind spots
  • It is hard for us to understand scale (such as thinking billionaires are marginally richer than millionaires)
  • We also have short memories (as we can normalize horrible events very quickly)
—> This is beautiful in some ways, but tragic in others

 

—> These flaws are important to understand
  • We know you care about your craft, recognize the complexity of work you engage in, and in participating the challenges/rewards of design at scale

 

—> For those operating at scale in larger enterprises, we recognize that to have impact we have to be at working at deeper layers of infrastructure
  • Slow layers have all the powers
  • Fast gets all attention

 

—> How do we scale soul?
  • The answer depends on work you choose to take on, and how to choose what work nourishes you
—> My company, Nava,  came from the effort to build out healthcare.gov, and our mission to make government services simple, effect, and accessible to all
  • We have worked on safety net, and supporting unemployment insurance benefits
  • We’ve also worked on new initiatives such as expanding paid leaves laws in the states
—> We characterize ourselves as firefighters that think like architects  or architects running toward fires

 

—> Civic tech is a fifty year project, and we are ten years in, and our work is not alone here, with partners including:
  • The Helsinki Design Lab
  • Center for Urban Pedagogy
  • Code for America
  • And many others
—> There is deep and difficult work to be done

 

—> We are in dark and tragic times these days, with a systemic government failure that has led to 600,000 dead, a number that feels impossible to understand

 

—> It makes me think of ACT UP activists from the AIDS crisis, who said the deaths from AIDS were not private affairs, since these deaths could have been prevented with adequate protection

 

—> We, like them, are witnesses to a crime of neglect

 

—> We are also in an economic crisis, with millions of livelihoods at stake since state unemployment insurance systems can’t meet the demand placed on them

 

—> We are paying the cost of fragility borne by us and our systems
  • For example during the Texas power outages, people were melting snow in bathtubs to wash kids, out of fear they would not be able to access running water
—> I want you to know none of this was inevitable

 

—> All of this didn’t have to happen

 

—> Systems have dispositions whether intentional or not. At Nava we think about this a lot

 

—> We also think about quotes like this at Nava: “Any sufficiently advanced neglect is indistinguishable from malice.”

 

—> Now, I will go through three examples of practices brought in as professional services firm to brought in tech problems
  • Tech is not the answer or root cause for these problems
  • Rather, we are looking for leverage points for high impact

 

—>  When we started working with the Veterans Affairs administration, their appeals backlog was out of control, with over 450,000 appeals, and with veterans waiting five years for a reply to an appeal

 

—>  We tried to design new tools for caseworkers to use

 

—> As we followed the steps in the design process, we found a form filled out by caseworkers that others in the agency weren’t using
  • It was called Form 8 and had been in existence since the 1930s

 

—> So instead of just wire-framing and coding, we worked to remove an old process that atrophied
  • Our project included training and gathering feedback, and rolling out the change in workflow and training tutorials

 

 

—> VA found they would save 17 years of manual labor through our cashflow management tool

 

—>  The case backlog has significantly decreased, and is set to be clear in a year

 

 

—> We have seen VA invest deeply in veteran’s experience, and have seen trust in the VA seriously increase as result
  • Trust in a 600,000 person organization improved by 24% in just five years

 

—> We also build paths toward simplicity
  • We worked with state level efforts to integrate health/economic benefits with Code for America and the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

 

—> Our engineering skills bring us in, but our service design skills give us a structural impact we work to make happen
  • We constantly talk to people who will end up using our service

 

—> An example is our research with the state of Vermont to launch a document uploader to help people enroll for government benefits
  • We also helped people submit key documents required for eligibility

 

—> Our efforts had an impact. Caseworkers texted us out from their field offices, praising the changes, and we reduced the average time to enroll to five days from nine
  • We also got approval to roll the program out state wide, and the Vermont legislature approved the changed
—> Now the document uploader is state wide, integrating 37 different health and economic programs in Vermont, into a single portal for vulnerable populations to access

 

—> We also empower stakeholders and leave them better than when we found them.

 

—> We developed a design system for Center for Medicare and Medicaid services, and are developing a standard for the agency as a whole
  • All work will have same look and feel
—> We built a sketch kit of React component to allow people to mock things up

 

—> It was amazing to watch a designer who worked at Medicare and Medicaid services, whose role had diminished to simply providing redlines and auditing wireframes, build using our system
  • This woman was able to produce her own wireframes for what medicare.gov should look like

 

  • We were confident that contractor’s wireframes could translate to people’s lived experience and that it had the right types of validation

 

—> We also think about us as an organization, and leaving it better than when we started it
  • As company founded in a crisis (we were people who knew people), we were beneficiaries of access and privilege
—> We have a goal of preventing an old boys club, but breaking barriers down
  • We’ve grown to 200 people, and have become majority women across the board
  • We will hit a milestone of becoming majority BIPOC soon

 

—> We’re doing this to increase access to the kind of work we do,
  • We’ve begun an engineering apprenticeship program and it’s rewarding to see the interest and making transition into civic design space
—> Thinking about our role, if we are at the beginning of a fifty year effort to rebuild trust in institutions, we were also founded at the tail end of another fifty year project, where companies where encouraged to focus on maximizing profit and profit alone

 

—> We are placing our mission at the core of our organization: To improve government’s ability to serve people, and access to key public services

 

 

—> We’ve made a dent in the past few years: We’ve saved hundreds of years of time for public and civil servants, and saved hundreds of millions for agencies in operating costs

 

—> It’s been dizzying in the past few years to capture the scale of these challenges, and it’s easier for us to forget and move on

 

—> However a memory stands out to me, which makes visceral a certain sense of scale
  • It begins with the first Women’s March on Washington in 2017
  • DC that day felt like a funeral with everyone mourning or enraged,
—> I ended up at Washington Memorial, where the AIDS memorial quilt was located, and read the number of attendees at the Women’s March in DC was how many veteran’s were waiting for appeals

 

—> I looked around trying to understand that scale, with entire city’s populations worth of people around me
  • This was how many veterans were waiting to hear their appeals

 

—> I think about that memory at inauguration where death tool had crossed 400,000 inauguration and now at 600,000, and heartbreaking period
  • Some of you might have lost friends
  • Some of you might have got sick with COVID and recovered
  • Some of you might have known people who’ve lost loved ones
—> There have been people who have called 2020 the lost year for so many:
  • Kids who lost a year of education
  • Those who died
  • Those who lost work
  • People with Covid
—> I have a serious question for you:
  • If this was a lost year, what did you lose this year for?
—> I want to ask all of you this, as the loss and pain leaves you raw, and also hardens you
  • We hope this year will shape you in some way
  • That the injustices and failures of institutions that you have witnessed this past year, whether they were shocking or sadly familiar
    • I hope they don’t paralyze but animate you

 

—> Let’s allow this moment to focus our attention and determination to raise the stakes for what we take on next in terms of work, as there is still so much work left and so many lives at stake
  • So much work to build and repair
—> The cracks in safety net have exited for decades, and will require sustained and direct action to end them

 

—> A friend of mine, who was pulled into the tech surge to save healthcare.gov, said he thought that infrastructure of civilization was someone else’s problem, but he had the realization that it was “My problem the whole time”

 

—> He said: “All of my prior professional accomplishments evaporated seeing people successfully enroll in Obamacare”
  • I had similar experience working on healthcare.gov, where I learned the statistic that 40,000 people died each year in the US because they were uninsured
    • Crude back of the envelope math showed that every 1,000 people who enrolled for ACA program was the equivalent to life saved down the line
    • I could not get that number out of my head, watching enrollment numbers appear on the dashboard

 

—> I want to say that the perspectives you are bringing to this space and skills you are building in this conference, we need those in service of our public institutions. These skills include:
  • Consensus
  • Legacy Modernization
  • Designing for acessability
  • Designing without resources or mandate
  • Approaching critique
—> All are immensely valuable to public sector and critical public services
  • Some people are already working in these spaces
  • To others, I say our critical public services are key foundations of our times
    • With declining trust in democracy, racial strife, climate volatility, it feels overwhelming to direct our attention towards these issues
—> We can’t solve any of the problems of outage, without delivering effective public services to the public
  • Our institutions must be able to deliver the promises they make for the public
  • If we can’t meet these basic needs, we might not deserve to face these other crises

 

—> But I don’t follow a specific heroic narrative, as my own path to this work was strange and circuitous
  • I want to highlight Sara Schulman’s role on ACT UP, who points out that political progress is won by coalition
—> Many paths to working in the public sphere, and many leverage points to intervene

 

—> Leverage points include volunteer efforts, term limited engagements, mentoring roles, and more

 

—> Digital service teams in the US and abroad, as well as outside orgs like Code for America

 

—> I can’t promise that it won’t be easy, as we face design at scale in government context

 

—> But I’d like to give a reminder to ourselves that progress takes work and doesn’t come for free and costs something (time, attention, energy) and operates across an intimidating time scale
  • But only because the problems are decades in the making
—> Before you move on from anger, grief, frustration, let it shape you and let the experiences of this lost year, alter direction of your life, and bend your career towards the public

 

—> We cannot give the best work if we are not taking care of ourselves
  • Don’t let the fire that brought you here, be the fire that burns you out
—> Take out the note that would give your energy. Bring it back again and actually give yourself the permission to do that act after this conference

 

—> We are ten years into a fifty year project, and I hope our paths cross along the way

 

—> Thank you!

 

Q&A

 

  1. How do you NOT get overwhelmed by the scale of the problems you are facing?

 

—> The thing we talk about is understanding what you have control and authority over, versus influence over
—> Some things we can control, but other things are outside of our span of control
  • This helps us navigate the obstacles along the way

 

2. Progress takes work (so true) and change takes time. Given the culture of government, how do you get the right level of commitment from gov leaders to make progress?

 

—> The civil servants we work with are most dedicated and passionate people we’ve ever worked with, they have worked in agency for decades trying to push on problems

 

—> We’ve also seen idea that tech has the solutions, and just need to be communicated
  • In fact it’s the opposite, people understand the problems and structural incentives and pain points
—> Culture there is paralysis and lack of investment in skills and tools to get to that future state

 

—> This audience has ability to break down challenges and illustrate the paths forward

 

3. How can the broader design community contribute to your work and redesigning public services?

 

—> The space is growing and nascent and we need to bring in a level of tenacity and humility towards expertise in institution

 

—> More concretely, lot of movement at state and digital service teams
  • Look at layers that resonate with you, and problems to work on