From Practitioner to Subject: What Happens When You Design for Yourself

Service designers spend their careers centering the user. Mapping journeys, surfacing unmet needs, holding space for the emotional texture of other people’s experiences. But what happens when the user is you?

Self

Field

Format

Reflection & hands-on

Day

Friday, Oct 16

Room

Aula M

Time

12:00 PM

Turn the method inward

A practitioner-to-practitioner conversation about applying service design methodology to your own career, self-care, and next chapter — with particular honesty about navigating pivots as a Black woman in spaces where you rarely see yourself reflected. Expect a framework, not a finished product. We are all in the messy middle together.

Why is this conversation important now?

This conversation is especially urgent now, as the design field contracts in traditional roles while expanding in adjacent ones, and as practitioners from underrepresented backgrounds navigate not just professional uncertainty but the additional weight of often building careers in spaces where they rarely see themselves reflected. The field’s contraction is not hitting everyone equally, and that truth deserves to be named in the room.

Who is this session for?

This session is for service designers navigating career transitions, professional pivots, and the quiet exhaustion of sustaining a practice in a field and industry that is shifting beneath their feet. Particularly those who have done that work while being one of the few people in the room who look like them.

Key takeaways

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for turning the methodology they already know inward: how to define the problem before jumping to solutions, how to treat a pivot as a series of low-fidelity prototypes rather than a leap, and how to write a design brief for their own next chapter.
Most of all, they will leave with the reminder that the rigor and empathy they bring to their most complex client work is available to them too. And that they do not have to navigate this alone!

Kelli Wilbert

Kelli Wilbert

Sr. Program Manager & Service Designer

Kelli Wilbert is a Senior Service Designer and Program Manager who has spent her design career working at the intersection of equitable design, human-centered research, and organizational change — across civic technology, healthcare, and large-scale tech companies including Amazon and Workday.

Her path into design is anything but traditional coming from a background in the nonprofit and public sector, that includes participating in the US Fulbright Scholar program. Kelli has always brought a social impact lens to her practice,conducting participatory research public benefit users, advancing health equity in hospital systems, and building the operational infrastructure that helps organizations show up more equitably for the people they serve.

Kelli has lived and worked across Europe, South America, and the US, and brings intersectionality, cultural fluency, and identity positionality into everything she designs. This includes, most recently, her own next chapter while she is on sabbatical.