About the Centre
The Centre for Citizen Experience is Jess McMullin’s platform to use design to help the public sector increase its effectiveness in service delivery, policy creation, and problem solving. He works embedded within public sector teams and with a network of collaborators in order to realize the vision of government as a service.
To accomplish this, he focuses on four areas:
- Increasing design competency for public sector service delivery teams.
Work to “teach teams to fish”. Provide project and process consulting, proof of concept prototyping, training, resources and ongoing coaching. - Bring design methods to policy design.
Help policy makers understand how design tools like visual thinking, field research, codesign and prototyping can benefit policy creation. Find public service innovators and partner with them to advance policy projects and pilots that adopt these tools. - Advocate for design and citizen experience to be adopted across the public sector.
Make the case for more effective service delivery and policy creation using design tools. Promote a citizen-centered perspective backed up by real methods and practice, not just rhetoric. Speak, publish, hold events and individual meetings to spread awareness and adoption. - Continue to innovate the practice of citizen experience design.
Many methods from design, customer experience, social sciences and other disciplines are valuable for the public sector. But which work best? We do research to refine and advance the practice, through action research in our work with clients, in commissioned research projects, and independent projects.
About Jess McMullin
Jess is the founder of the Centre for Citizen Experience and Situ Strategy, a consultancy dedicated to transforming public service delivery and policymaking through design innovation. Strategic design engagements include shaping strategy, policy, and service delivery plans based on citizen-centric research, co-design, prototyping, and visual thinking. He also works to train and mentor public design teams to grow these capabilities within government.
Jess also campaigns as a design advocate, working throughout the world to increase awareness of the power and potential for design innovation to benefit the public sector and the people it serves.
He has worked in design and user experience since 1996, and worked with Fortune 500 companies, Silicon Valley startups, and progressive public sector institutions as a partner in his own firm before dedicating his career to citizen experience design in 2009.
He is active in the user experience, design and innovation communities having co-founded the Information Architecture Institute, the Overlap innovation retreat, Canux, the Canadian User Experience Workshop and serving as co-chair for the Information Architecture Summit in 2011 and 2012. He has spoken at dozens of conferences about user experience, design thinking, and organizational transformation, and recently contributed a chapter on design for policymaking to the 2012 book Usability in Government Systems: UX Design for Citizens and Public Servants.