Ways We Design the Intervention
Consulting, workshops, and research grounded in systems thinking — helping teams see the whole picture and design the shift, not just treat the symptom.
An Integrated Practice
Most consulting starts with the problem as the client describes it. RAD Studio starts one level down, with the conditions that keep producing it.
The four modes below are one practice seen from four angles. Design Research finds where the real opportunity sits. Consulting and workshops build a group’s capacity to act on it. Collaboratory design gives a scattered group somewhere to think together. Graphic facilitation makes the thinking visible while it is still happening, and usable long after.
The work is grounded in Intervention Design Thinking (IDT) and the 4C Macroscope — frameworks developed in practice at the intersection of systems thinking, political ecology, and design.
Consulting & Workshops
Strategic engagements and hands-on workshops in Intervention Design Thinking, service design, and human-centered design — building a group’s capacity to see its own system clearly and design the shift.
Grounded in IDT and the 4C Macroscope. Delivered as half-day workshops, multi-day intensives, or ongoing partnerships, for UC agroecology consortia, food systems and climate networks, and university centers across Hawaiʻi and California.
Collaboratory Design
Structured Miro boards and digital collaboratories for multi-stakeholder co-creation — turning scattered input and competing perspectives into shared maps a group can decide from.
Built on Collaboration Architecture principles refined across years of virtual engagements. Most useful for geographically distributed networks and cross-institutional alliances that need somewhere to keep thinking between convenings.
Graphic Facilitation
Visual Systems Scribing — live graphic facilitation of workshops, conferences, and strategic sessions, drawing real-time dialogue into systems maps and story arcs a room can point to and build from.
Built at IDEO, taught at CIID Copenhagen and Fung Academy Hong Kong. Graphic facilitation earns its keep when a group needs to see itself thinking.
Design Research
Systemic immersion, storytelling, and opportunity-area mapping — research that surfaces the conditions underneath a problem rather than the problem as first presented.
Informed by Causal Layered Analysis. CLA works four levels down: the headline, the structural causes, the worldview holding those structures in place, and the myth underneath. Most needs assessments stop at the headline.
From the Field
One engagement from each mode, and what it produced.
Hawaiʻi Food System Change Map
Design Research · Systems Mapping · 2023
Designed and facilitated the collaborative mapping process behind Hawaiʻi’s Food System Change Map — the first engagement with Transforming Hawaiʻi’s Food System Together. Partners from across the islands built the map together in a Miro collaboratory, charting how the current system holds together and where structural change could enter. The map went on to anchor the initiative’s theory of change and its Integrated State Food Policy Framework.
UC Food System Transformation Collaborative
Collaboratory Design · Strategic Facilitation · 2023
Four UC institutions — UC Santa Cruz, UC Davis, UC Berkeley, and UC ANR — each with its own culture and metrics, asked to build one shared theory of change for California food system transformation. Wr designed the virtual environment and the convening process that made it possible: a workspace the group kept returning to, instead of a series of meetings that each started over. With WorldLink Consulting.
Hawaiʻi Food System Summit
Graphic Facilitation · Live Visual Scribing · 2023
Live scribe for the statewide food system summit — keynotes, panels, and working sessions drawn as they happened, so a room of several hundred people could see the argument it was building while it was still building it.
Nourish California 2.0 — TomKat Ranch
Convening Design · Facilitation · 2025
At TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, designed and facilitated a convening of food system leaders, the funders backing them, and the advocates pushing from outside — three groups that rarely sit in one room and rarely agree on what equitable and regenerative mean in practice. The work was building a structure where that disagreement could be productive.
Who Works With RAD
- Funders and foundations running grantee learning networks who need more than a report at the end of it.
- Food systems and agroecology organizations building a collective theory of change across institutions that don’t share metrics.
- University centers and multi-institutional coalitions that need a shared workspace to survive between convenings.
- Movements and campaigns that need strategic communications with real analytical depth behind them.
Engagements run from a single workshop to multi-year partnerships.
Most begin with a conversation.
Every engagement starts with a conversation about what the system needs, which is not always what the brief asks for. If you’re not sure which mode fits, start there.
Or read the frameworks behind the work: Intervention Design Thinking · Lunatic Sprints · RAD Ideas