Quick Look at The Lab at OPM

The Innovation Lab at the Office of Personnel Management partners with public sector organizations looking for new approaches to their most complex challenges. We are the federal experts in teaching and applying human-centered design to help solve complex public and cross-sector challenges. The lab brings together private sector fellows, public servants, and students who collaborate to design new solutions based on the needs of those we serve. We use three strategies to accomplish our mission.

Strategy 1: Leading Public Sector Design

We regularly bring innovators together to share insights on the growing movement to bring design into the public sector. We also produce publications on the public sector design movement, including the results our partners are achieving.

Strategy 2: Doing Public Sector Design

We work with public sector organizations to conduct design projects that explore root causes of public sector problems and design services, policies, and programs that address them. Examples have included including improving the USAJOBS website, building human-centered design capacity at the Veterans Administration, and working with the Millennium Challenge to conduct ethnographic research into root causes of poverty in the Philippines.

Strategy 3: Teaching Public Sector Design

Our three-day Human-Centered Design Fundamentals workshop teaches the theory and practice of human-centered design. Participants learn why, when, and how to apply human-centered design to their public sector work and leave the workshop with a toolkit of human-centered design methods. The lab also offers one and two-day versions of the workshop and is developing additional curricula to build more specialized skills.

For more insight on how innovation is changing government, check out the October 2016 article, “7 Steps to a More Innovative Team” in The Public Manager, or listen to the podcast interview with Stephanie Wade.