We’re excited to share that design leader Melissa Casburn will bolster Coforma’s design practice by inspiring and championing equitable and inclusive design, and trauma-informed solutions for communities served by Coforma’s partners.
Melissa’s focus on how to best serve the individuals impacted by these products and solutions will help us support our government partners to enhance their customers’ experience with digital services and decrease the psychological and time burdens of obtaining government assistance.
“Being of service has always been a part of who I am as a designer and a design leader, and I’m thrilled to turn that energy toward the creation of digital solutions for public good. The Coforma team is deeply compassionate and highly skilled, and it’s an honor to lead and support them in this work,” said Melissa.
Prior to her role at Coforma, Melissa was the Senior Director of User Experience at Puppet. For more than seven years, she designed tech for technologists and grew as a thoughtful and strategic design leader.
Melissa is also a passionate tech ethicist who founded Puppet's Product Ethics Council, helping create a product code of ethics for the company to proactively identify and address potential sources of harm.
“Melissa brings a servant leadership and partnership leadership approach that supports and aligns with Coforma’s values, as well as experience with organizational transformation, framework and system creation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and a knack for building trusting relationships that will enable thoughtful growth within our Design department,” said Coforma CXO and co-owner Ashleigh Axios.
3 Questions with Melissa Casburn
We asked Melissa to respond to the following questions as a way for others to get to know her a little better.
What do you think is unique about this moment in design?
The influence of AI. We're living through a huge shift where so much of our free time, social time, entertainment time is mediated through small electronic boxes. The way screens and keyboards are designed dictate new forms of human interaction, leading to potential loss of older ways; my stepkids, who are 11 and 13, have never learned how to write in cursive!
And now we have AI, which came slow then fast, and it’s impossible for any of us to know what impact that will have. We’re conducting a gigantic experiment on humanity right now.
How are ethics brought into tech?
For most people, ethical ideas and frameworks are influenced by philosophers and delivered through multiple sources: religion, family, school, subcultures. Each one of us individually has to figure out how to make decisions and to make a framework for our own lives, and those personal frameworks are going to differ. When we bring those different frameworks to the office, how do we reconcile them? Which one do we use to make decisions and negotiate conflict? Which one “wins”?
I spent eight years in DevSecOps, designing tech for technologists. I founded a Product Ethics Council in late 2020, and the council created a Product Code of Ethics for the company. We worked to understand and articulate our specific potential to create or amplify harm. Once that work was done, we translated our desired ethical position into strategy and tactics that we could operationalize and measure.
Ethics and values are influenced by time and place. It’s something you revisit as technology changes around you, or your product mix or market or audience changes. None of these things are ever fixed, which is why I say we start with the philosophers, and then you have to bring in all of the modern day influences and figure out how to apply it to what's happening in the world around you.
What are your first thoughts coming into Coforma’s design department?
I spent a lot of my career on the agency side, where we did really comprehensive, thoughtful, intentional design with an emphasis on research. Then I had almost a decade where I worked in software where the focus was “ship, ship, ship” everything really fast.
I’m excited to be back in an agency and to see the design-forward and human-centered approach we take. It's one thing to build a fun tool with fun tech, but when you start with the human—which we absolutely do—you hope that at the end of the day you've done something that can actually serve the folks we are trying to serve.
What I’m finding at Coforma is that we really live our values in a way that I’ve never seen before. We are human-centered through and through.