Institutional Navigation
topic
Institutional navigation — the direct experience of dealing with large institutions (healthcare, legal, educational, government, financial) from the perspective of a person requiring their services rather than working within them — provides the specific creative input of understanding how institutions function from the outside, what the gap between institutional stated purposes and actual user experience is, and what the specific friction points are that institutions produce for the people they purport to serve.
Role
Institutional navigation experience is the creative input most directly valuable for any creator designing systems, services, or organizations intended to serve people — because the experience of being a user of institutional services reveals the specific ways in which those services fail, the assumptions they make about their users, and the friction they impose that insider perspective systematically misses. The healthcare system designer who has experienced the healthcare system as a patient has access to creative input that their colleagues who have only worked inside those institutions cannot replicate.