SDNNYC: The Work Beneath the Work

Wednesday, June 10th, 6:00-8:00 PM EDT
Presentation
The Work Beneath the Work: On the enabling, connecting, and sense-making layer of service design

Event Description
There's a layer of design work that exists inside almost every organization, but rarely has a name. It's not design ops. It's not strategy, at least not in the way those disciplines are usually understood. It shows up in the conversations that shift how teams think, the workshops that don't produce a clean output but somehow move things forward, and the quiet act of connecting people who should have been talking months ago.

This talk is about that work. Through examples and honest reflection on what it costs to do it: politically, emotionally, and organizationally, we'll explore how service designers often find themselves doing organizational change work without realizing it. And why naming that matters, both for the work itself and for the people doing it.

The second half of the session is a conversation. We'll use the room's collective experience to sit with a simple question: What do you call the work that would fix that gap?

About Our Speaker
Dhea Sekararum
Dhea Sekararum is a Service Designer and Design Strategist at Verizon, where she works inside a large design organization helping teams build the conditions for more coherent, customer-centered work.

Her path into design began in clinical psychology and behavioral science, a lens she still brings to her thinking about organizations, people, and the gaps between them. She holds an MFA in Transdisciplinary Design from Parsons and has spent over 10 years working across UX research, digital product design, service design, and strategy in tech, travel, healthcare, logistics, and education in Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the US.

She's drawn to the work that makes other work possible: the sense-making, the bridging, the slow organizational change that rarely gets a job title.
Agenda

• 6:00-6:30PM Meet & mingle over