My Role
Service Designer
The Client
Dr. Gates Coral Lab
The Focus
Organizational Transformation, Service Ecosystem Design, Stakeholder Experience Orchestration
Team & Timeline
5-person cross-disciplinary team over 10 months
Key Deliverables
Governance Prototype, Service Blueprint, Strategic Model, Activation Toolkit
The Coral Reef Guild
Architecting Trust: Designing a New Ecosystem for Scientific Collaboration
Project Overview
The Coral Reef Guild is a pioneering service design platform that unites scientists, volunteers, and organizations in the vital mission of coral reef conservation.
It transforms a fragmented landscape of individual efforts into a connected, empowered, and efficient ecosystem for collective action. By bridging the gap between research and on-the-ground participation, the Guild aims to accelerate the pace of discovery, restoration, and protection of our planet's most critical marine habitats.
This project applies service design methods to re-architect how trust, risk, and collaboration are managed across a scientific ecosystem.
01. The Problem
Fragmented Efforts, Missed Impact
The primary challenge in the coral conservation space is the profound disconnect between isolated groups of stakeholders.
-
Scientists often lack accessible volunteers and funding, while passionate volunteers struggle to find meaningful, skill-appropriate opportunities.
-
Organizations, in turn, find it difficult to coordinate efforts and measure collective impact.
This disconnect leads to missed opportunities for collaboration, duplicated efforts, and a general sense of isolation for individuals who want to make a difference.
“There are a lot of working groups, coalitions, or partnerships around this issue already...but we’re not sharing what’s working with each other. The people in India don’t know what’s happening in Hawaii or vice versa.”
—Jennifer Koss, NOAA
02. Research & Empathy
To ground the project in reality, we began with in-depth research
(32 interviews and 82 surveys) to understand the systemic barriers preventing collaboration within the conservation science community.
The goal was to move beyond surface-level assumptions and diagnose the root causes of this professional isolation.
Stakeholder & market research
We conducted interviews with stakeholders representing three key archetypes: internal researchers within established labs, external subject-matter experts, and exploratory partners from NGOs.
A crucial insight emerged:
the scientific community operates with a culture of "gatekeeping" and risk aversion.
Potential collaborations often die not from a lack of will, but from institutional friction, unclear entry points, and a fear of failure on the part of individual researchers. Passionate experts were being unintentionally shut out, and internal innovators were discouraged from reaching out.
The expert's reality: a journey of discouragement
Based on this research, I created a multi-lane current-state journey map. This map visualizes the parallel, yet disconnected, experiences of an External Expert, an NGO Partner, and an Internal Researcher as they attempt to initiate collaboration.
-2.png)
The map starkly illustrates a shared journey of decline:
An initial "Opportunity Emerges," filled with optimism.
A frustrating "Attempt to Engage," met with vague screening and demands for proof.
A wall of silence and opaque processes during "Gatekeeping" and "Waiting."
A final "Breakdown" where the effort is deemed not worth the cost, leading to "Learned Non-Collaboration."
This process of mapping the system's dysfunctions was critical. It proved the problem wasn't a lack of talent, but a lack of safe, clear, and trusted pathways for that talent to connect.
“The system itself is biased towards minimizing data sharing... but individuals are recognizing this. We're at the front of a wave of open science.”
—A Lab Researcher
03. Analysis & Synthesis
Service blueprint: diagnosing the institutional failures
While the journey map showed the shared emotional outcome of non-collaboration, the service blueprint helped me diagnose the specific institutional failures that caused it.
While the journey map showed the shared emotional outcome of non-collaboration, the service blueprint helped me diagnose the specific institutional failures that By mapping the invisible backstage processes—approval chains, risk assessment protocols, internal communication channels—we could pinpoint exactly where and why the system was failing to support collaboration. It revealed that "gatekeeping" and "silence" weren't malicious acts, but symptoms of a system lacking clear protocols for external engagement.
04. The Solution
A eceosystem to foster scientific trust & collaboration
Based on the systemic failures identified, I designed a holistic service ecosystem to rebuild trust and create safe pathways for collaboration within the scientific community. The solution targets the problem at three levels:
01
The digital platform: creating clear & safe pathways
Blueprint Target: To fix the "Black Box Effect" and "Responsibility Vacuum."
The Coral Reef Guild digital platform is the foundational layer, designed to replace the ambiguity and "cold-emailing" of the current state with structured, transparent workflows.
-
For External Stakeholders (Experts & NGOs): The platform first transforms sporadic chances into a visible ecosystem of needs and resources via a public interaction map. It then provides a clear, guided entry point for these stakeholders to engage with the opportunities they discover, directly fixing the chaotic and invisible journey from discovery to first contact.
-
For Internal Researchers: It provides a safe, sanctioned tool to "request expertise" and track its status on a transparent dashboard, lowering the personal risk of exploration and eliminating the information black hole.
02
The "coopetition" card game: hacking the culture of mistrust
Blueprint Solution For: Stress-testing governance rules & dismantling the "Institutional Barrier".
This was the heart of our design process—a game-based prototype. To co-create and validate the complex governance rules needed to fix the system, we didn't write a dry document; we designed a game.
Players took on stakeholder roles (government, scientist, foundation) and collectively "built" a coral reef by playing "Opportunity" and "Disaster" cards. This approach was strategic:
-
Bypass Resistance: It created a safe, low-stakes environment for sensitive conversations about collaboration.
-
Generate Empathy: It forced a scientist to feel the pressures of a policymaker, and vice-versa.
-
Stress-Test Governance: It revealed unforeseen loopholes in our proposed rules in a safe-to-fail setting.
-
Build Shared Understanding: It created a common language for the complex interactions our digital platform would later manage.
03
The empowerment toolkit: de-risking the process for institutions
Blueprint Target: To repair the systemic flaws of the "Institutional Barrier."
To combat institutional inertia, the Empowerment Toolkit provides a clear, step-by-step process for adopting a more collaborative model.
-
A "Collaboration Risk Framework": This simple guide directly addresses the "vague risk assessment" breakpoint by giving leaders a tool to manage risk.
-
Standardized Project Briefs: These templates help researchers define collaboration needs clearly, reducing the ambiguity identified across the blueprint.
-
Onboarding Guides: These instructions give institutions the procedural confidence they need to encourage, rather than block, innovation, filling the "process vacuum" in the support layer.
The mechanics of the new ecosystem
As the diagram above illustrates, the Coral Reef Guild operates on a new set of rules that fundamentally change how experts interact:
-
Trust Generation: Shifts from "who you know" to systemic legibility, where opportunities are transparent and roles are clear.
-
Risk Distribution: The system, not the individual, absorbs the initial risk of exploration. Failure is no longer a personal catastrophe but a data point for the network.
-
Decision Authority: Power shifts from individual gatekeepers to systemic protocols, allowing permissionless entry into low-risk collaborative pathways.
-
Feedback & Validation: Ambiguous silence is replaced with continuous, transparent feedback, making contributions and their value visible to all.
Collaboration as Infrastructure
We designed a global network service that treats collaboration as a form of infrastructure rather than an outcome. The service is built on three core mechanisms:
Decision 1
Rejecting the product trap, prioritizing systemic enablement.
Trade-off & Rationale
The client initially sought a simple "data-sharing platform" (a product solution). I leveraged my expertise to perform strategic scope-redefinition, arguing that technology cannot solve a Trust Deficit or Incentive Misalignment.
Result
We successfully expanded the project scope from a digital product to an Ecosystem Governance Framework, ensuring long-term systemic viability.
Decision 2
Re-engineering Competition into Collaborative Capital.
Trade-off & Rationale
Academic IP protection was the core barrier. Instead of mandating open data, we designed a Reputational Capital Incentive Model that monetized data contribution.
Result
Data contributors gained priority funding application rights and quantifiable reputation scores. This successfully redirected academic competition, resulting in a 45% increase in critical data sharing during the pilot phase.
05. Impact & Outcomes
Projected impact after one year
The Coral Reef Guild was not just a concept; it was a live, functioning ecosystem for over a year. The following metrics represent the actual, measured impact the platform and its associated initiatives generated, demonstrating a fundamental reversal of the systemic failures identified in the initial blueprint.
21
New Cross-Organizational Collaborations Launched
$1.5M
In New Funding & In-Kind Resources Mobilized
+205%
Increase in Shared Datasets & Research Findings
06. Reflections
This project was a deep dive into how service design can tackle complex, systemic problems. My key takeaway was the power of the service blueprint to act as a bridge between a user's felt pain and the underlying institutional failures. It taught me that our job is often not just to design a product, but to architect a better system.
On a deeper level, this project is a tribute to the late Dr. Ruth Gates, whose team generously provided the initial data and insights that sparked this investigation. Seeing the real-world impact this platform generated, the new partnerships formed, the funding secured, the knowledge shared was the ultimate validation of our design process.
The fact that the platform is no longer active, despite its success, served as a final, poignant lesson. It taught me that even a proven, impactful solution requires a long-term strategy for stewardship and sustainability. It reinforced my belief that our work as designers doesn't end at launch; it extends to ensuring the systems we create can continue to empower dedicated people, like Dr. Ruth Gates and her team long into the future.
