Katy  Arnold 

Katy Arnold is a user researcher and digital design leader. Whilst at the Home Office she built a community of 250 designers, researchers, and accessibility specialists and was accountable for the quality of their work across products and services used by millions of people. 

Katy is passionate about inclusive research and design practice. She established ground-breaking research and design initiatives to support vulnerable users and oversaw projects in ambiguous and complex problem spaces with refugees and victims of modern slavery. These fed directly into service design and policy development. 

Do’s and Don’ts accessibility posters. These helped establish inclusive design is a core foundation of product and service delivery. 

Design Maturity: How to have impact

When we talk of design maturity we usually mean the maturity of the organisations in which we operate. There are a plethora of maturity models, scales, and assessments which we hope will encourage organisational leaders to create the conditions for good design practice to flourish. However, by focussing purely what we’d like others to do, we risk ignoring our role in all of this. 

Drawing on her experience building and leading design communities in the UK Government, Katy will explore what it really means to achieve design maturity. 

She’ll argue that we are not passive actors in these situations – we have more agency than that. Instead, we should be intentional about our interactions with the people who are here with us – so that we can all move towards greater maturity of thought, practice, and inclusion. 

This talk is about how to achieve genuine co-creation and how opening ourselves up to include the perspectives of others allows us to build credibility and have greater impact.