Designing the future together.
Aspen Trees grow through a networked system of roots in groves together. This connection helps them thrive in the environments where they are located.
Labs are spaces where experimentation and learning occur. They are places where scientists go with a burning question and use processes, tools and equipment at their disposal to chip away at their challenge.
Christi Zuber, PhD, RN founded Aspen Labs after a 16 year tenure at Kaiser Permanente where she founded and grew a Human Centered Design and Innovation practice across an organization of 210,000 people. She has two decades of experience in-the-field creating insights and ideas, and leading impactful and joyful teams who shake up common convention. She's half practitioner, half thought-leader/academic/speaker who brings as much energy to an effort as she does savviness. Dark chocolate is her Achilles heel.
Founder & Managing Partner
Brian has over 20 years of enterprise systems integration experience in various roles. As a consultant, Brian has lead interface and data migration teams through many enterprise-wide systems implementations (Epic EHR and Oracle ERP). As an IT manager at Kaiser Permanente, Brian lead teams from different departments and external vendors through dozens of data integration projects.
Technology & Operations Director
Mike Lin spent 20+ years bringing a human voice to innovation and design. In the first half of his career, Mike worked in consumer goods - helping clients like PepsiCo, Diageo, Royal Caribbean, Microsoft and Samsonite develop and launch new brands and products. More recently, Mike turned his focus toward design and innovation in healthcare as a leader at Kaiser Permanente and Centura Health. His work in human-centered design has been featured in the Harvard Business Review and Fast Company.
Strategy & Innovation Director
Tim has over a decade experience in the healthcare innovation space where he helped grow and lead a global consortium of healthcare orgs interested in connecting around methods and projects. Tim was the Director for Innovation & Design at Dignity Health, where he focused on organizational human-centered design capability building. He also served as a member of the Adventist Health Innovation Council for three years. A common thread through all his work is his eye toward design, incorporating engaging communications, graphic and media design into projects. In college, his Summer job was background actor in TV and film so before you ask – yes, that was Tim posing as a high school student in season 3, episode 2 of Gilmore Girls.
Creative Director
Dana Ragouzeos is a designer and researcher with extensive experience working within health care organizations, such as Kaiser Permanente, Mayo Clinic, and UCSF School of Medicine. Her work has ranged from designing symptom dashboards and decision-making tools for patients and families to guiding national health equity policies with design insights. Her favorite part of any job is giving people the opportunity to express and pursue the big ideas that have been lingering in the back of their minds for a while. Dana also teaches classes on interaction design and design research at California College of the Arts, Cal State East Bay, and UC Berkeley.
Design & Capabilities Director
Brittney is passionate about people, change management, and building teams. Her diverse background spans both clinical and operations in community health, leadership, human centered design, issue advocacy, and grassroots organizing. She is guided by a strong sense of social justice, loves to raft rivers, read good books, and eat chocolate.
Capabilities & Research Strategist
Lewis Brown, Jr. MA is a strategic transformation leader, enterprise level project manager and executive business partner with 20 years of experience developing, launching and integrating organizational programs and teams in the public and private sectors. Using agile – human centered design techniques, he has developed solutions for industries, economic development regions, and education systems.
Workforce Development & Youth Empowerment
Glenn Fajardo connects to create. As the Director of the Co-Design Practice of the TechSoup Global Network, he has worked NGO Partners around the world to build and expand programs and partnerships. Glenn has also taught at the Stanford University d.school, most recently Design Across Borders in Spring 2018. Formally trained in nuclear engineering sciences and public policy, Glenn plays electric bass and likes to cook in other people’s kitchens.
NGOs & Virtual Engagement
Carolyn Lyons has worked in education and early childhood domestically and globally since 2002 after a career in global telecom and media. She has served in multiple leadership roles and understands how to build multi-sectoral partnerships and movements centered in the authentic voices of families and caregivers with business and philanthropy, and advocacy. She has been a mentor and advisor to multiple national and global early childhood innovation initiatives, investment firms, and businesses in the Global South on social impact strategies.
Early Childhood Education
Adrienne is a certified organizational development consultant with extensive experience in whole system change. With a demonstrated ability to ramp up quickly in learning, innovating and making improvements in any industry and work environment, and nimble enough to navigate even the most bureaucratic environment, Adrienne influences individuals and groups with empathy and respect, without positional power.
Organizational & Faith-Based Development
Monica has 15 years experience playing rugby, and also as a healthcare administrator that grows new departments and teams. She embraced design thinking after reluctantly accepting that numbers don't tell the whole story. Her passion is leading sustainable programs that keep people healthy, and changing the financial incentives in the market to keep people healthy.
Healthcare Improvement
Certified in human-centered design and change management, and a curator of out-of-the box ideas who can also successfully convert them into impactful solutions, Kari has 18+ years healthcare experience developing new products, go-to-market strategies and patient experience improvements. She is known for tackling large-scale implementations, and her love of dogs and soccer.
Marketing & Product Design
Jason is a designer by trade with over 20 years of experience, much of that in the financial industry. He is the Director of Innovation Practice & Enablement at the LOFT, the innovation arm of Manulife/John Hancock. Since 2012, Jason has been learning, teaching and using Design Thinking in every aspect of his professional life. He organizes the Boston Design Thinking Meetup.
Design Capability
Dr. Deana McDonagh, is Professor of Industrial Design in the School of Art + Design at the University of Illinois (Urbana-Champaign). She is an Empathic Design Research Strategist who focuses on enhancing quality of life for all through more intuitive and meaningful products, leading to emotional sustainability.
Inclusive Design
As a graphic facilitator, Emily Shepard is passionate about using the power of visuals to help people clarify their thinking, collaborate effectively and create change. She listens deeply to group conversations, and draws real-time maps with words and images that synthesize what’s been said. This allows people to see what they’re thinking, and gives them an efficient, tangible way to make choices, align, and share their process with other stakeholders.
Graphic Facilitation
Michelle is a seasoned healthcare consultant, with both provider and payer experience, with a background in nursing. She is interested in helping people by applying design strategies to solve problems, improve complicated processes, and facilitate communication.
Healthcare Strategy
Walter has established himself as a founder of an award-winning firm, Herbst Produkts, with multiple Red Dot and IDEA awards. He brings his expertise for product design development into the classroom as a professor of undergraduate and graduate students at Northwestern University. In 2018, Dr. Herbst was named as a fellow to the National Academy of Inventors. He holds over 125 patents in hardware, houseware and medical products.
Product Design
Dr. McNeal is an academically trained health communication scientist with prior corporate healthcare experience and clinical experience. As a rising Dissemination & Implementation Scientist, her interests are to improve health equity within the African American community in diabetes and cardiovascular disease management and prevention.
Implementation & Equity
Endlessly curious and action-oriented, Alexis is a designer that loves digging into complex problems. She's currently at the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative building technology that enables personalized learning environments. Before CZI, Alexis was a service designer working in healthcare innovation at Kaiser Permanente.
Communication Design
A Networked System of Roots
People actively learning through design and experimentation to do something meaningful together.
Field savvy & research-based
We blend thousands of hours of in-the-field design and innovation development with a deep understanding of the research and science backing it. We’ve developed infrastructures such as innovation labs, internal design teams, and training programs to make it real and make it stick.
Growing creativity and cultivating innovation
Change and innovation is catalyzed through individuals and teams. We model how it’s done so you can eventually lead in your own organization, unleashing creativity with real approaches and methods that work. We connect people back to real purpose.
Gathering insights and testing assumptions
People are interesting and unpredictable. We use a blend of methods from design, change management, innovation science and business process to help you see the experiences of your users, stakeholders and employees with fresh and open eyes.
