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Transform 17 Speaker Insights: Ariel Kennan

Early Bird registration for our Transform conference has just been extended by a week to Friday 3 March. That’s all the excuse we need give you some insight into our next featured speaker, Ariel Kennan, whose talk is titled “Making Public Services Effective and Accessible“.

Ariel Kennan is Director, Design and Product at the Center for Economic Opportunity for the New York City Mayor’s Office.

Her team is improving service delivery and advancing equity and opportunity for all New Yorkers through service design and building the best in class digital products.

Her work includes service design, digital strategy and policy, mobile applications, websites, and media installations with a wide variety of cultural, corporate, and government partners.

She is an alumna of Parsons School of Design and has held fellowships with Code for America and the Center for Urban Pedagogy.

Ariel Kennan

Ariel summarised how she arrived at her current position in a January 2017 interview with Doreen Lorenzo for FastCo Design:

“I first came to New York City to go to Parsons’ Integrated Design program, which was one of the first design school programs in the United States to embrace a multidisciplinary perspective. They knew that in order to solve the world’s hardest problems, designers needed to work with people from multiple disciplines.

After college, I went on to work for ESI Design, where I had the opportunity to design a new city in China. From that point on, I knew I wanted to build and design things for cities. Because government controls a lot of what happens in cities, I knew I better understand how it all works. So I applied and was accepted to the Code for America fellowship program.

Code for America helped me gain the vocabulary, knowledge, and expertise to have an informed conversation about what drives change in an urban context, along with the core design skills that I already had. So when I came home to New York City, Mayor de Blasio was just taking office. I had seen him speak previously and was so impressed. From there, I knew I wanted to serve my city.”

Originally published: https://www.fastcodesign.com/3067006/designing-women/how-ariel-kennan-solves-nycs-most-intractable-design-problems

Ariel gave an idea of the kind of projects she works on in an interview with Dave Seliger for Conscious magazine:

“I’ve been very fortunate to work on a lot of cool projects, everything from giant LED signs in Times Square to media installations in retail stores and museums. I even worked on a new city in China several years ago.

But in the last couple years I’ve been working directly with local governments. When I was a fellow at Code for America, I worked with the mayors and their staff in Kansas City, KS and Kansas City, MO.

I’m really proud of the technology we built over the course of the year to help the city better serve entrepreneurs, but most of all I’m proud of the larger community and government change that we helped create – not only through community organising, but helping the governments write policy and create new roles within the government itself.

To me that was a much bigger, lasting impact than any single app could achieve.”

Originally published: http://consciousmagazine.co/innovating-gotham-ariel-kennan/

Ariel Kennan

In that same interview, Ariel showed her understanding of one aspect of government service delivery when she commented:

“Government is full of people who are incredibly well intentioned and who want to improve our cities. But sometimes I think public servants get held back by the larger systems of government, like procurement, human resources, and technology delivery.

I’m really interested in how to bring new skills to public service, including design. What are the modern standards? How can we be more agile and nimble in the way that we work? And how can we be more informed by the people who actually use our products and services? By bringing these design values and skills to government, we can create more efficient and effective policies and services.”

Originally published: http://consciousmagazine.co/innovating-gotham-ariel-kennan/

The FastCo interview showed Ariel also addresses the issues from the perspective of the citizen user of government services:

“Government is really good at organizing itself into specific issue areas, and thinking about which policies govern which pieces. But it’s not necessarily looking at the individual resident who has to touch five different agencies to have something change in their lives. My job is to ask the question, how do we bring better services across all of those points?

We’ve been doing this in a few different ways. One has been using design as a service. We currently have a design team made up of public servants that are also full-time designers. They worked on the mayor’s new street homelessness initiative, HOME-STAT.

But what we quickly realised was that stakeholders across the city didn’t understand the service from end-to-end, even if they understood their part of it. So we talked to everyone who touches the service including people who are actually on the street. We journey mapped the entire experience from end-to-end and brought different stakeholders together to co-create changes that they would like to see — from policy to communications to data to tech.

We’re also working to build capacity and create tools not only for ourselves to do the design work but for others across the city to learn and have the tools to do it themselves. We’re developing a new design playbook for different services and departments within the city.

We’re also creating a framework to be able to evaluate design interventions in the city and know if they’re effective. We want to know that we’re not just doing design for design’s sake.”

Originally published: https://www.fastcodesign.com/3067006/designing-women/how-ariel-kennan-solves-nycs-most-intractable-design-problems

Civic Design Camp

In 2014, Ariel was one of the co-founders of the US East Coast branch of Civic Design Camp. There is a concise and well illustrated summary of the event, written by Carly Ayres for design site Core77 called “Civic Design Camp: Talks, Task Forces, Taboos and Tools for Large-Scale Impact“:

“It’s not often that an event brings government officials, public servants, visual and industrial designers together in the same room… but when it does, you can expect a truly forward-looking conversation.

At least that’s what organizers Dave Seliger and Ariel Kennan had in mind when they decided to bring Civic Design Camp to the East Coast: With the goal of creating “better citizen experiences” across the board, the 70 attendees spent last Saturday rethinking government programs and initiatives.”

Read the full article at http://www.core77.com/posts/27886/Civic-Design-Camp-Talks-Task-Forces-Taboos-and-Tools-for-Large-Scale-Impact

The video below shows Ariel’s presentation to the annual Code For America conference in 2015.

If you want to keep up with Ariel’s work, you can find her here:

angellist: https://angel.co/ariel-kennan
facebook: https://www.facebook.com/arielkennan
flickr: https://www.flickr.com/photos/arielmai/
foursquare: https://foursquare.com/user/59170799
github: https://github.com/arielkennan
google+: https://plus.google.com/111347713481414198767
instagram: https://www.instagram.com/arielmainyc/
linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/arielkennan
medium: https://medium.com/@arielmai
twitter: https://twitter.com/arielmai
website: http://www.arielkennan.com/

If you want see Ariel in person, come along to Transform 17 in Canberra at the end of March. See you there.

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