Fabrika Berlin

Designing a service from scratch, not a screen

A Berlin-based initiative I co-founded: Russian-language workshops for teenagers on a range of topics, all built to teach design thinking by doing. I co-founded it with a partner and led the communication and most of the workshops.

Service design in its purest form

No interface — just people, touchpoints and a system. I designed the whole journey a teenager travels through the programme, and stitched it into the city: partnerships with the Tochka library, the Clavis art school, and a Potsdam foundation working with teenagers who'd arrived from Ukraine.

We interviewed 7–8 teenagers across the groups we served — local, newly-arrived, Russian- and Ukrainian-speaking — so the programme fit real lives rather than our assumptions.

Teaching the method, leading a mixed team

• Teaching. I led most of the workshops — teaching design thinking to people who'd never heard the term, by having them do it.
• Facilitation. The team was deliberately cross-disciplinary — an improv-theatre actress, an urbanist, a coach, a developer and two designers. Coordinating that mix around one programme is the design work.
• Partnerships. Aligning a library, an art school and a foundation — each with its own goals — around one service.

Running and growing — the school was the dream

We got it running and growing — 10+ workshops, 100+ students, inbound interest up ~40%. The bigger ambition — a grant and a full school, something like a VHS — was the dream we were building toward, not a finish line we reached.

I can grow design practice in other people

I can stand up a service from nothing: research real users, design their journey, align institutions and a mixed team, and make it run. And I can teach the method itself — the same thing I bring to a design team: helping others think this way, not just doing it for them.