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Intercultural Practice and Equity · Public-service practice
Most of a service is decided before anyone calls it design. Four lessons on carrying lived experience, accessibility and equity from discovery through requirements, contracting and rollout, ending with an impact-on-people section you add to a real project charter.
40–45 minutes · 4 lessons · Voluntary learning
The six points in a division project where the shape of a service is settled, what it costs to change a decision at each one, and why accessibility handled at the end becomes an exception process.
What the division's own records can and cannot say about a process, and how to bring lived experience and community expertise into defining the problem before the design is fixed.
Every requirement is a task assigned to someone outside the building. How to see where a design puts the work, change the defaults that decide who gets through, and write down the trade-offs you accept.
A six-field section you can add to any project charter, the five moments to reopen it, and how to keep it honest when the answer is “we do not know yet.”
Choose one project you are working on now. Add the six-field impact-on-people section to its charter, complete what you can, name the person you will ask about each unknown, and reopen it at the next decision point.
Ask when a state service was designed and most project records will point to a phase with the word design in its name. By then, most of what decides whether the service works for people has already been settled: what the problem is called, who is assumed to be at the other end of it, what counts as evidence, and how much time the work has. This module follows a division project from discovery through requirements, contracting, pilot and rollout. It looks at whose expertise counts in defining a problem, how requirements and defaults create burden that falls unevenly, how to make trade-offs visible instead of quiet, and how to write an impact-on-people section into a project charter so those questions travel with the project instead of arriving after it.
Ask the question while the answer is still cheap. After award, every change is a change order.
Keep the design questions in view while you define a problem, write requirements, draft a solicitation, plan a pilot or sponsor a project.
Add the six-field impact-on-people section to the charter of one project you are working on now, and bring it to the next project meeting.
Participation and course completion in this program do not count toward DHS-required training credits unless management, a director, or DHS leadership expressly approves an exception.
U.S. Department of Justice guidance on the obligations of state and local governments to make programs, services and activities accessible to people with disabilities, including program access and effective communication.
Guidance on involving people with disabilities from the start of a project and throughout it, and on why early involvement finds problems that a late standards check does not.
Federal guidance on building accessibility into program management, including roles, policies and incorporating accessibility requirements into acquisition and project lifecycles.
Federal plain-language guidance on testing drafts with the people who will use them, including task-based and paraphrase testing.
National standards for culturally and linguistically appropriate services, including governance, community partnership in design and evaluation, and language assistance.
Minnesota's council advising state government on disability policy, accessibility and the participation of people with disabilities.
Minnesota's state program for evaluating whether programs achieve their intended results, and for building evidence into program decisions.
The design reference for this curriculum: multiple ways to engage, culturally responsive materials and accessible instruction.