Building a service design framework for the Air Force
Summary
Through the U.S. Air Force (USAF)’s AFWERX program, we developed the Service Design Accelerator — a framework for embedding service design into how Air Force organizations deliver technology. Across two Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) phases, we partnered with the UC San Diego Design Lab to build a rigorous framework, validated it against real operational challenges at BESPIN (Business Enterprise Systems Product INnovation) and the Weather Systems Program Office (WxPO), and produced a practitioner guide that USAF teams could use independently. The framework later became the foundation for BESPIN’s Design Studio — a standing capability now serving 20+ programs.
The challenge
The USAF’s software factories — BESPIN, Kessel Run, Space CAMP — had successfully spread modern delivery practices, including user experience (UX) design. But UX design, as practiced, focused on individual digital touchpoints rather than the full end-to-end experience. A forecaster toggling between disconnected weather tools, an airman navigating a multi-step inprocessing workflow — these journeys spanned digital, organizational, operational, and physical touchpoints that no single product team was designed to see whole. At enterprise scale, that narrow lens perpetuated a patchwork of partial, disconnected solutions.
Service design offered a more holistic alternative — a proven discipline for designing and aligning an organization’s operations to support complete user journeys. Outside of government, organizations like Google had already embraced the approach, and the UK Government Digital Service had proven it could work in the public sector. Within the Air Force, however, the discipline hadn’t taken hold — there was no framework adapted for defense contexts and no trained practitioners within the software factories to apply it.
The USAF engaged us through AFWERX — the Air Force’s innovation arm — to develop a solution for rapidly scaling service design adoption, starting with BESPIN and WxPO. Both had strong leadership support and an appetite for new ways of working, making them ideal proving grounds for a framework that would need to survive contact with real organizational complexity.
The solution
Lasting adoption doesn’t come from external consultants delivering a finished framework — it comes from developing the approach through real work, with real teams, on real problems. We designed the Service Design Accelerator around that principle: a solution that combined readiness assessments, hands-on engagements, skills development, and reusable toolkit creation into a single scalable model.
A structured readiness assessment determined where to start. Rather than spreading thinly across the Air Force, we evaluated organizational readiness — leadership buy-in, openness to change, existing capacity — to identify where the framework would gain the most traction. WxPO and BESPIN emerged as the right proving grounds.
We validated the framework against WxPO’s stalled cloud migration — a high-stakes, high-visibility challenge. WxPO’s effort to migrate 75+ applications to the cloud had stalled for organizational rather than technical reasons: siloed teams, miscommunication, and no shared vision. By applying service design to diagnose and address the root causes, we demonstrated the discipline’s value through concrete outcomes while building WxPO staff capabilities through pairing. The engagement identified eight priority improvement areas and gave WxPO the capacity to drive the migration forward independently.
The academic partnership with UC San Diego’s Design Lab gave the framework its rigor. Translating service design principles into a structure that worked within the USAF’s operating environment — with its security constraints, acquisition processes, and organizational complexity — required more than practitioner intuition. The collaboration produced a comprehensive service design framework and a 70+ page practitioner guide, along with a training curriculum that progressed students from both WxPO and BESPIN through hands-on coursework.
Capability development roadmaps charted the path forward for both organizations. Drawing on our collective experience working together, we mapped where WxPO and BESPIN needed to grow their service design capabilities and in what sequence. Stakeholder briefings and case studies captured the value of the work, building the internal case for expansion. That case proved persuasive — the framework matured into a standing Design Studio capability that now serves 20+ programs across the Air Force and beyond.
The results
- Developed and validated the Service Design Accelerator through two STTR phases, producing a commercially viable framework that has since secured over $60 million in Phase III contracts
- Produced a 70+ page service design practitioner guide in collaboration with the UC San Diego Design Lab, giving USAF teams a reusable reference for applying the discipline independently
- Unblocked WxPO’s stalled cloud migration by applying service design to diagnose organizational — not technical — root causes, identifying eight priority improvement areas
- Trained practitioners through a service design curriculum built on the UC San Diego framework, seeding internal expertise within both BESPIN and WxPO
- Laid the foundation for the Design Studio — a standing capability that grew directly from this R&D work and now serves 20+ programs spanning the Air Force and civilian agencies like the CDC