Making the case for reinventing the wheel in government

Four years ago I left the creative oasis of the Rhode Island School of Design to join the federal government. I moved to the nation’s capital from the nation’s smallest state days after the 2016 election. After two decades teaching some of the most creative students in the world how to give purpose to their imagination, I was ready to bring that on to Washington.

The small innovation lab I was joining was in the sub basement of a federal building — a “cool space” for government standards, not so much for my own. My job was to share the design process with government employees and help them use it to address public problems. The design process is a flexible approach that the different design disciplines adapt to their own needs. The way a fashion designer, an architect, or a service designer work to get to solutions may seem different, but it has a similar core, which is what I wanted to make available to the federal workforce.

Around the time of the 2018 midterm election, I moved from the lab to a leadership development unit within the same agency to work with senior executives. By this time, I knew government well enough to be conversational in acronyms. I knew the pains of purchasing even the simplest things. I was proficient at filling work reports using software that seemed out of an early James Bond movie. Thinking I…