The US Navy Commander, Naval Meteorology and Oceanography Command is responsible for delivering weather and environmental forecasts and visualizations to support the decision making of Navy, Coast Guard, and civilian sailors and scientists. They have partnered with the Navy’s Tactical Advancements for the Next Generation (TANG) Program to reimagine how they deliver and improve their products and support.

The Navy’s TANG Program has always believed in radical partnership to solve gnarly challenges with the DoD and uses a suite of Human-Centered Design and rapid prototyping approaches to bring the voice of our uniformed and government service partners to the design table.

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged our ability to build together in person and has driven us to develop approaches that have made our design process even more accessible to our partners. At the end of January 2021, the TANG Program executed an all-remote co-creation event that teamed up government personnel with UI/UX Designers to kick off 3 months of prototyping. Our challenge is to improve the tools and processes to empower teams to “streamline routine operations so they can better swarm complex missions.”

Further, we will discuss how giving government personnel the tools and support to wireframe their solutions and share solutions directly with decision makers built deep empathy and better understanding of the community needs.

This talk is for anyone interested in exploring new approaches to integrating design into government operations. Especially government leaders or team members who are wondering how to engage with designers and leverage design to solve apparently intractable problems. For advanced designers interested in expanding their tool kit we will also share practices we have found successful in facilitating a large virtual co-creation event.