About the Service Design Studio at the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity (2025)
Meet the Service Design Studio and understand how we partner with New York City Agencies!
Sitting within the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, the Service Design Studio (“the Studio”) helps spread valuable service design and community-centered design methodologies often underused in government. We collaborate with City agency partners to enhance existing services or design new ones that are effective, accessible, and dignified.
Our approach begins with understanding the needs of people who use, deliver, and administer public services. We seek feedback from different perspectives and test prototypes of service enhancements before implementing them at scale.
👉 Check out civicservicedesign.com to learn more about our tools, past projects, and what we’ve been up to.
Who we are
Our Studio is made up of designers with varying experience and educational backgrounds in public administration, qualitative research, visual design, and participatory design. Meet the Studio team!
What we offer
The Studio is an ‘on demand’ partner for NYC employees to elevate public services through collaborative design. We offer one-time consultation, team training to build design skills, and partnership for short-term projects for NYC City Agencies and Offices.
Click to jump to a specific offering:
Office Hours
Visual Design Projects
Rapid Design Research Projects
Design Skill Workshops
Plain Language Design Forum
Civic Design Forums (CDF)
Designed by Community (DxC)
Community Compensation Fund (CCF)
Office Hours
What are Office Hours?
Each week, we set aside time for City employees to meet with our designers to get light-touch consulting on a project or idea, or just learn more about how service design is applicable to the work of your City agency.
👉 Sign up for an Office Hour!
Visual Design Projects
What are Visual Design Projects?
Visual Design Projects create clear, engaging, and accessible materials used to communicate with the public and within government. Our team creates design deliverables shaped by user feedback, meaning you can expect light engagement with your stakeholders to develop functional and engaging visuals. From flyers and service flows to infographics, we’ll partner with you to craft engaging and effective designs.
✅ Visual design projects incorporate user research, human-centered design, or other participatory research methods with communities who use them.
✅ We incorporate accessibility into all visual design materials with plain language writing, color contrast, and usability with screen readers.
✅ Visual Design Projects typically include deliverables such as:
- Infographics (a visual that makes complex ideas easier to understand)
- Informational assets (one-pagers, flyers, brochures, palm cards)
- Flows or maps (service flows, systems maps, journey maps)
- Marketing and branding assets (low-fidelity brand development)
- Signage (for a physical space)
- Short video (under 5 minutes)
- . . . and more!
Visual projects we don’t do:
⛔ We do not pursue visual design projects unrelated to decreasing poverty and increasing equity.
⛔ We do not produce visual design projects without user feedback.
⛔ We are not an on-retainer graphic design agency. (We have limited capacity, and will work with you to decide a project’s scope and timeline.)
⛔ We do not design reports or documents longer than 5 pages.
⛔ We do not build digital products or apps. We offer high-level advisement on web content user experience, but we are not product experts. 💻 — If you are looking for help building a digital tool, learn about support our Product team can offer.
👉 Sign up to work with the Studio on a Visual Design Project
Rapid Design Research Projects
What are Rapid Design Research Projects?
Design research centers the perspectives of the people who use and administer a service. Centering these perspectives is key to understanding how a service is experienced and opportunities for improvement. Our process is a systematic approach to understanding users, their needs, and the context in which a product or service will be used.
The Studio uses a service design process to carry out the research. The service design process combines qualitative and quantitative methods to understand people’s experiences, discuss motivations, explore preferences, and identify pain points. We organize, validate, and ideate to provide a summary of what we heard and recommendations for how to improve. Input gathered through this process can be used to smooth operations, inform planning, evaluate a service, and generate ideas.
✅ Rapid research projects must incorporate participatory research methods with communities who use them.
✅ We strive to always share back project outputs with all who contributed.
✅ Rapid research projects typically include deliverables such as a research project plan and an end-of-project report (Note: The project report is not the final outcome. It will include recommendations based on the insights gained during the research. Implementing these recommendations is the responsibility of the agency or office)
What we do not do:
⛔ We do not pursue projects unrelated to decreasing poverty and increasing equity.
⛔ We do not pursue quantitative research projects that require computational data analysis. 📊 — If you need assistance with a computational data analysis, learn about how our NYC Opportunity colleagues can support you
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⛔ We do not conduct peer-reviewed studies or large-scale projects. 🔎 — If you need assistance with evaluation & research analysis, learn about how our NYC Opportunity colleagues can support you
👉 Sign up to work with the Studio on a Rapid Design Research Project
Design Skill Workshops
What are Design Skill Workshops?
Design skill workshops are opportunities for NYC City agency staff and their partners to brush up on or learn valuable design methods and skills. Workshops provide instruction, opportunities to apply and practice new skills, and takeaway tools or materials for sustained learning and application. Workshops are typically offered in-person and can accommodate small to large groups.
The Studio is currently offering the following workshops:
- 🗺️ Journey Mapping (3 hours): A journey map is your key to seeing a service, program, product, or system through the eyes of users— capturing their experiences over time. This powerful tool helps you understand their perspectives, pinpoint pain points, and uncover opportunities to improve or create more dignified services. Whether you’re developing something new or evaluating an existing program, journey mapping workshops are a must for teams looking to elevate their work. You’ll leave with insights and strategies that can make a real difference in the lives of the people who use and administer a service.
- [Coming late 2026] ⚙️ Service Design Tools & Tactics (3.5 hours): The Tools + Tactics workshop provides hands-on training on the basics of service design. Participants will walk away with an applied understanding of how to conduct a sprint of design research, identify insights from the research, and use these insights to inform enhancements to services.
👉 Request a Design Skill Workshop for your team
Plain Language Design Forum
What is the Plain Language Design Forum ?
Plain Language writing and design is all about making sure your audience understands your message the first time. Join us for this hands-on training and unlock techniques to transform your writing into clear, accessible, and easy-to-read content. Whether you’re communicating with your internal team or the public, this training is a game changer for City employees looking to enhance their communication skills. You’ll leave with practical tools you can apply right away — making every message more effective and impactful.
Plain Language Design Forums are offered on a ~quarterly basis. Sign up as individuals and encourage your colleagues to join.
👉 Sign up for an upcoming Plain Language Design Forum
Civic Design Forums
What is the Civic Design Forum?
Civic Design Forum events bring together individuals across the New York City human services ecosystem to share knowledge, skills and experiences. Forums are built on the concept of a ‘community of practice’ where we collectively learn and share ways of working that make public service delivery more effective, accessible, and dignified.
Forum events explore a wide variety of public sector innovation topics including, but not limited to:
- User testing and participatory practices
- Community-centered design and engagement practices
- Accessibility design
- Communications design
- Operations design
- Service design methods
- Systems thinking and policy integration
- Experience measurement
👉 Have an idea for a Civic Design Forum? Book an office hour with the Studio to explore what is possible.
Our Pilot Programs
Designed by Community
The Designed by Community (DxC) Program is a fellowship and project funding opportunity developed by the Studio.
DxC, or as we say “D by C,” is a community-led approach to designing community-based services. The Studio works with one community-based organization and 6 community fellows (residents with lived experience) to design and develop hyper-localized solutions for their neighborhood using the service design methodology.
Thanks to support from Citi Community Development and the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City’s partnership, we have piloted two cohorts.
👉 Learn more about each cohort below!
- Cohort 2 (2023): Watch the Documentary & Read the Case Study
- Cohort 1 (2021): Read the Case Study
Community Compensation Fund
The Community Compensation Fund (CCF) pilot invests in compensation for community members/residents who inform City agency work and build evidence about the impact investments of this kind can have. The CCF streamlines access for City employees to physical or digital cash gift cards to compensate residents for participating in activities that improve the City’s work. Participatory activities intentionally include people most affected by the service and can be conducted in many forms.
The CCF pilot is a partnership between the Studio, the Institute for State and Local Governance (ISLG) at the City University of New York (CUNY), and ideas42, a nonprofit behavioral science organization. The ideas42 New York City Behavioral Design Team serves as the managing partner of the fund.
👉 Learn more about the CCF and how to apply here.
Office-wide Support Offerings:
As part of the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity, we build on our colleagues’ expertise in program development and evaluation, performance management, product design, data analytics, and more! Our interdisciplinary team has extensive experience collaborating with City agencies and offices to help advance their goals. Read how teams across the office can support you:
For Product Design Support 💻
- The Studio and the Product team can offer high-level advice on web content user experience, and user interface. To request, book an office hour.
For Computational Data Analysis Support 📊
- Our colleagues from the Poverty Research Unit can provide data analytics to build an accurate description of who is in poverty, identify some of the leading causes for being in poverty, and measure how citywide programs work to offset the poverty rate. In addition, the team leverages a variety of data sources to help inform the City’s understanding of inequality. The also analyzes the impacts of anti-poverty policies and workforce programs, ensuring the city’s initiatives are grounded in solid evidence and truly resonate with community needs. To connect with someone from the Poverty Research team, complete this request form.
For Research & Evaluation Support 🔎
- Our colleagues from the Programs and Evaluation team routinely partners with City agencies on rigorous evaluation projects of all types and scale, including data analysis, large scale projects, implementation research, participatory research strategies, needs assessments, and mixed methods studies. If you are interested in partnering with the team on a research project, complete this request form.
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This post was published by the Service Design Studio in the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity. The Studio works to make city services more effective, accessible, and dignified for low-income New Yorkers.
