Our Approach
You serve humans, so your services should be designed for them. It sounds simple enough, but we often see health services designed around past practice or what passes for best practice, without recognizing the people who deliver care or receive it.
We craft services for people, using human-centred and systems-oriented design.
This means designing for people’s skills, preferences, needs, desires, and capabilities to ensure accessibility, equity, and effectiveness. It also recognizes that your services don’t exist in a vacuum; they need to align with your capacity, vision, and requirements, and fit within the systems around you. A good service does it all.
Most service problems aren’t fixed by working harder or adding resources. They’re fixed by redesigning the service itself and recognizing when the fit between what we do and the systems we work in isn’t there.
This is the work that turns strategy into something tangible that delivers health and the promise of you as a leader.
This is service design built for complexity.
How We Design
We start by understanding the current state — what the service is trying to do, where it’s falling short, and what’s already working that should be preserved. That means reviewing existing evidence, mapping how the service actually moves through the hands of the people who deliver and receive it, and identifying where the gaps between intention and experience are largest. This gives you a user- and systems-focused look at what you’re doing and achieving before we even start.
From there, we design iteratively — building early concepts, developing workable models, and refining them with feedback before committing to full implementation. We call this progressive prototyping: moving from rough models to workable solutions in stages, providing co-design opportunities to increase learning and relevance.
And because a design that can’t be implemented isn’t a design — it’s a recommendation — we stay involved through implementation, providing concrete guidance that turns the work into something your organization can run, sustain, and adapt as conditions change.
What Makes Us Different
Service design in health differs from that in other sectors. The stakes are higher, the systems more complex, and the people using services are often navigating the hardest moments of their lives. We design with that reality in mind.
Because our work spans strategy, evaluation, and design, we don’t redesign services in isolation. We work with you, your team, your clients, and your partners using research, design thinking, and prototyping to ensure you’re tackling the right problems and creating the right service to meet those needs.
And unlike design consultancies that hand over a blueprint and leave, we design for implementation from the start — building in the practical constraints, organizational realities, and sustainability considerations that go beyond knowledge translation. We combine leading implementation science with behavioural design and include an evidence-generation and evaluation framework as part of each design, so you can see and document the impact of the changes you make.
Impact in Action
Our methodology has proven effective in significant transformations—helping public health departments transition from pandemic operations and designing more effective cancer support services.
We deliver implementable solutions that evolve with changing contexts and needs.
If you have a service that isn’t working the way it should — or a new one that needs to be built right from the start — let’s talk.
