Building a service design framework for the Air Force
Summary
Through the U.S. Air Force (USAF)’s AFWERX innovation program, we built the Service Design Accelerator — a framework for embedding service design in how Air Force organizations deliver technology. We developed it across two Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) phases in partnership with the UC San Diego Design Lab, validating it at BESPIN (Business Enterprise Systems Product INnovation) and the Weather Systems Program Office (WxPO). 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 had spread modern delivery practices, including user experience (UX) design. But UX, as practiced, focused on individual digital touchpoints, not the full end-to-end experience. A forecaster toggling between disconnected weather tools, or an airman navigating a multi-step inprocessing workflow — those journeys span digital, organizational, operational, and physical touchpoints. No single product team was designed to see the whole. At enterprise scale, the narrow lens kept producing a patchwork of partial solutions.
Service design offered a more holistic approach. It’s a proven discipline for aligning an organization’s operations to support complete user journeys. Outside government, companies like Google had adopted it. In the public sector, the UK Government Digital Service had shown it could work. Inside the Air Force, though, 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 way to rapidly scale service design adoption, starting with BESPIN and WxPO. Both had strong leadership support and an appetite for new ways of working. That made them ideal proving grounds for a framework that would have to survive contact with real organizational complexity.
The solution
We knew that 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. The Service Design Accelerator combined four ingredients into one scalable model.
An honest readiness assessment surfaced where each organization actually stood — and where the gaps would block scaling. Rather than spreading thinly across the Air Force, we evaluated readiness on three axes: leadership buy-in, openness to change, and existing capacity. WxPO and BESPIN emerged as the right proving grounds.
WxPO’s stalled cloud migration was the proving ground — a real program where the framework either worked or didn’t. WxPO’s effort to migrate 75+ applications to the cloud had stalled. The reasons were organizational, not technical: siloed teams, miscommunication, no shared vision. We used service design to diagnose and address the root causes, proving the discipline’s value through concrete outcomes while building WxPO staff capabilities through pairing. The engagement identified eight priority improvement areas. WxPO gained the capacity to drive the migration forward on its own.
UC San Diego’s academic rigor stress-tested the methodology against published research. Translating service design principles into a structure that fit the USAF’s operating environment took more than practitioner intuition. The Air Force has security constraints, acquisition processes, and organizational complexity that don’t show up in a textbook. Our collaboration with UC San Diego’s Design Lab produced a full service design framework, a 70+ page practitioner guide, and a training curriculum. WxPO and BESPIN students worked through it hands-on.
Capability roadmaps gave each organization a path to keep the work going after our engagement ended. Drawing on our work 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. The 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 across two STTR phases, producing a commercially viable framework that has since secured over $60 million in Phase III contracts
- Produced a 70+ page practitioner guide in collaboration with the UC San Diego Design Lab, giving USAF teams a reusable reference for applying the discipline on their own
- Unblocked WxPO’s stalled cloud migration by using 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