Think Zebras is a studio for people who want to change the world — and who believe that changing the world means changing how we do research and design.
We support every stage of the service design lifecycle, from asking the right research questions to get to the root of a problem, to building the right solutions to create real-world impact, to crafting the right evaluation strategy so you can show your impact.
Our Philosophy
At Think Zebras, we believe in people. We believe that people make the best choices they can with the knowledge and resources they have. We believe that when people make ‘bad’ choices, it’s usually because they’re dealing with constraints no one else has noticed. And we believe those constraints are the things researchers and designers should be targeting if they want to change the world.
There is a saying in medicine: when you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras.
It means that when you’re trying to find the cause of something, you should look for the most obvious answer — the one that shows up most frequently.
The problem with this approach is that, of course, sometimes the hoofbeats are coming from zebras. And if you never bother to check for zebras because they’re probably going to be horses anyway, you might end up thinking zebras are a lot less common than they are. So you end up treating a bunch of zebras like they’re horses, and then wondering why they’re not doing so well.
Think Zebras is an invitation to question your assumptions about our society, its systems and their users — to get curious about how you’ve been interpreting the patterns that you see in your practice, why you interpret them that way, and whether there are other interpretations you’ve been missing.
Meet Alex
Alex founded Think Zebras after watching the same problems play out over and over again in social impact design: frameworks that accept the status quo as-is, pilot projects abandoned after solving the wrong problem, and services that claim to innovate while ignoring the most neglected communities.
Previously Alex spent more than a decade crafting inclusive research, product and service strategies for Fortune 500 companies and federally funded health initiatives.
Alex is currently pursuing their PhD at the University of British Columbia, where they are studying how to redesign the diagnosis of chronic musculoskeletal pain.
In their free time, they like walking in the woods with their three rescue dogs, crafting, gaming and practicing herbalism.