Over the past few weeks, I’ve been reflecting on what it means to practice design within government. I’ve been considering what it asks of me, what it reveals, and how it’s shaping who I’m becoming. This retrospective is a personal account of that journey. It weaves moments of uncertainty, growth, and care, grounded in recurring themes like humility, reconciliation, and design ethics. Writing it helped me surface questions I’ve been carrying quietly and make space for the kind of reflection fast-moving environments rarely allow.

Where I started

When I first stepped into my role, I was transitioning into a new space. A space that was shaped by systems, structures, and responsibilities I didn’t fully understand. But I brought with me the instincts of a learner. The questions I carried helped orient me, even before I had clear answers.

In my first few weeks, I remember feeling alert and open, but also uncertain. I wasn’t sure if I had made the right decision to enter the public service. But I was eager to understand how my team and the broader organization worked. What motivated people? How were decisions made? Where did design fit into the broader picture? I also had questions about how user and client needs were being surfaced, the cadence of research, and the balance between user needs and technical constraints. I remember thinking about the relationship between policy goals and design early on. It was a lot to take in, and I knew that I wouldn’t be able to find all of the answers right away. I reminded myself to be patient.

I was mindful of how my experience and identity shaped the way I approached my work. I listened carefully to my peers. I was cautious about imposing myself too early, but I also felt a strong sense of duty. A duty to ask questions and to understand the nuance of the systems I was being exposed to. I came in wanting to earn trust by showing respect for what was in place, while also reminding myself to champion design as a practice that could help bring clarity amidst uncertainty.

Humility in my practice

As I settled into the work, humility became both a grounding force and an active tension. It helped me build relationships and navigate unfamiliar terrain. But it also surfaced challenges around advocacy, visibility, and self-recognition. This duality shaped how I moved through my day-to-day and evolved my sense of what it means to lead with humility in public service.

Humility helped me show up with curiosity in my role, especially in cross-team collaborations. In one instance, I remember facilitating a design critique where I wasn’t the subject matter expert. Instead of trying to fill the gaps, I focused on holding space for others to contribute and reflect. This practice helped build trust across disciplines.

In some ways, humility also made it hard to advocate for myself. Early on, I hesitated to take credit or push back when design decisions were deprioritized for seemingly trivial reasons. I certainly didn’t want to come across as inflexible or critical, especially in a role where relationship building is foundational to the work.

My professional definition of humility has evolved over the course of the past year. I’ve come to see humility not as self-effacement, but as a practice of perspective. It requires genuine discernment about when to take the lead and when to step back. I’m still experimenting with this, and I will share my thoughts on this topic again in the future.

Finding my confidence

Alongside humility, moments of confidence began to take shape, often when I least expected them. These weren’t loud declarations, but quiet affirmations that I had prepared well, built trust, and could offer something meaningful. These moments helped me feel more grounded in my role, not because I had all the answers, but because I was showing up with intention and clarity.

I remember one clear example when I surprised myself. I was facilitating a workshop with my team to brainstorm service metrics for our product. It was quite exciting since we were setting a precedent for the work and the methods we were proposing involved the creation of tailored dashboards and custom data visualizations. The existing research we had synthesized helped us propose a strategy that would align both business and user needs. I remember feeling nervous beforehand, unsure if I had provided enough context for the team and for myself to lead the conversation. But once I started, I was fully present and the team was genuinely responsive.

That moment felt like a turning point. I wasn’t just “acting” confident. I was grounded in the tangible preparation I had done and the relationships I had fostered with my teammates. I felt a deep sense of gratitude for the opportunity to offer clarity without needing to control the outcome.

Design in government

These personal shifts were mirrored in the complexity of the work itself. Designing within government brought layers of challenge I hadn’t encountered in other settings. It was in this complexity that I began to understand what it means to design not just for users, but within systems.

My work to support Action 3.15 of the Declaration Act Action Plan stands out. It brought together deeply personal stories, complex legal frameworks, and multiple systems with different mandates and ownership. As a designer, I had to bridge policy and technical infrastructure while holding space for community priorities. All of this was prefaced by the emotional weight of reconciliation and how my actions would ultimately affect people in the Province.

I recall one instance where we spent weeks developing sophisticated prototypes to gather information from our target audience. When we started testing, we realized that there were constraints that would impede the usability of the solutions significantly. There were moments when our prototypes couldn’t fully represent the nuances of the situation. Ultimately, we decided to forgo the interactive prototype for a form that could also be distributed and returned on paper. Through all of this, I learned that leadership often means asking the right questions, holding contradictions without rushing to resolve them, and designing artifacts that invite dialogue rather than a foregone conclusion.

Committing to reconciliation

One teaching that has stayed with me in the past year is that reconciliation is not a checklist, but a living relationship. Working with Indigenous partners on the Action 3.15 work made this learning real for me. The experience helped shift my understanding from abstract empathy to concrete accountability.

It changed how I listen to others in the context of my design work. I now know not to ask simply “What’s the user need?” but rather “Which voices are we missing?” and “Who has been asked to wait?”. Responsibility means doing the slow work of understanding systems, histories, relationships, and harms, especially the ones that don’t show up in the project brief, Jira ticket, or discovery plan. It means recognizing that research is never neutral, and the way that we frame problems can obscure or illuminate structural injustice.

Responsibility means building relationships before deliverables. It is resisting the urge to collapse complexity for the sake of progress. It requires humility, but also the courage to speak plainly about power, intent, and their consequences. Even small design choices like language, defaults, and sequencing can reinforce exclusion if we aren’t paying attention. Responsibility is a deliberate posture, one that asks me to prioritize care over speed, context over convenience, and accountability over optics.

Carrying forward

In reflecting on the year as a whole, I’ve realized that one of the most powerful things I’ve reclaimed is my background as a scholar. This affirming recognition is shaping how I want to move forward. My identity as a public servant doesn’t diminish my scholarship. It only expands it beyond the boundaries of what I knew to be possible. The academy isn’t the only place where scholarship belongs. Thoughtful inquiry, critical analysis, and due care lives in the questions I ask, the systems I map, the artifacts I generate, and the ways I share what I’ve learned.

I want to lean more fully into this identity. I’m not seeking prestige, citation, or recognition in the traditional sense. I want to bring greater intention to how I document, question, and contribute. Scholarship, to me, is a practice of sensemaking and stewardship. It’s how I show respect for the work that came before me, and how I hold space for those who will come after me.

I also want to carry forward the relationships I’ve built and the courage to name tensions without rushing to solve them. I’m learning that I don’t have to submit to urgency or compromise depth or rigour for speed. I’m still questioning how to balance clarity and care in my practice. I believe that how I approach this question will be key to challenging the status quo while sustaining relationships in the future.

In the next year, I will invite more reflection into my day-to-day work. Time to pause, synthesize, and make meaning out of disparate ideas. My hope is that the way I work can open space for others to bring their full selves.

Bonus questions

What’s one thing I’m proud of accomplishing this year that I haven’t said out loud?

I’m proud of the quiet consistency and rigour I’ve brought to my teams. Beyond the tangible outcomes like workshops, strategies, or design artifacts, I’ve made a steady effort to make things clearer, easier, and more human. I’ve helped others shape how they approach problems, even when my name isn’t attached to them. I’ve asked sharper questions, named tensions earlier, and held the line on quality even when timelines were tight. This kind of work doesn’t always get recognized, but it’s foundational to my practice. It’s how good intentions turn into better outcomes. Rigour and care are not opposites. They’ve always been part of the same discipline. And while I haven’t said it out loud, I’m proud of this foundation I’ve helped build. The trust I’ve earned in the process doesn’t necessarily have its own voice, but it is deeply rewarding.

Where did I feel most aligned with my values this year?

I felt most aligned when working with my team on Action 3.15. The work asked me to move slowly, listen deeply, and evaluate complexity with care. It wasn’t about designing a polished solution. Rather, I was surfacing tensions, translating policy and technical constraints into human terms, and respecting the pace and priorities of our partners. This project reminded me that design is not a neutral force in the world. It can uphold dignity or diminish it entirely. I was invited to think about which questions we weren’t asking, which notes weren’t being written down, and whose pain we were documenting as insights. Growing in a space where this fact was recognized and where I could contribute meaningfully felt natural and rewarding.

What would I tell someone else just starting their journey in the public service?

Start by listening. Think before you speak. Learn how the system works, but also where and who it fails. Your job as a public servant isn’t just to improve services; it’s to build genuine relationships and earn trust. Don’t be ashamed to be generous with your skills, but also with your curiosity. The work might start slow, but it can speed up at an instant. Your wins might be quiet, but always celebrate them because their impact is real. You don’t need to know everything to add value. Cherish that mindset. What you bring as an individual is enough. Stay open, steady, and grounded in what brought you into the public service in the first place.

What actions or projects will I prioritize in the next year?

I’m invested in confronting the lack of transparency in our research and design processes. In the digital space where open-source software has become a baseline, it feels increasingly untenable that our research plans, interview guides, synthesis, and design rationale remain hidden from the public we serve.

By failing to make these materials accessible, we aren’t just losing opportunities to build trust. Instead, we may be actively denying the ability to interrogate whether decisions were made with care, or whether harmful intent was part of the blueprint. If research and design can shape policy, and policy shapes the lives of citizens, then this opacity isn’t neutral. It’s a barrier to accountability and altogether harmful force.

I’m working with a small group of design practitioners on an initiative to publish a catalogue of services. Our goal is to standardize design knowledge across the institution. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. We view it as a shared, evolving foundation. It’s our hope that the catalogue will surface patterns, assumptions, and values embedded in our work. It’s the first step towards making the invisible visible. In the year ahead, I want to continue steering this work and explore what it means to publish open records that document the questions we asked, the tensions we held, and the tradeoffs we made. My intention is to invite reflection and shared responsibility, first within the organization, but then outside of it. The public deserves to see how our work is done.

I know that this kind of transparency won’t fix everything. But it can make it more difficult to use research and data as a “shield” for harm. And it might even shift how institutions understand accountability, not just as a report or deliverable, but as a living, visible, and evolving practice.