Hi, I’m Parc.
Service design leader · practice builder · systems thinker
I connect mental models to business models — building service design practices from scratch to deliver what didn’t exist before.
Selected work
Case studies
About
This is me
I’m a design leader who builds service design practices inside complex organizations to design, operate, and deliver intelligent services that hold up over time. First at Signal Theory, where I founded the Innovation & Experience practice from the ground up and wove it into a 150-person agency. I’ve been doing a version of it ever since at Harmonic Design, across engagements ranging from a 100-year-old Fortune 500 insurer to a global airline. None of it started with a clear mandate. All of it ended with investment secured, business units aligned, and something real running in market. I don’t advise from outside. I operate as a player-coach, co-creating the practice and the methods with the people who sustain the work after I’m gone.
I’m a true midwesterner and Kansas City native, married to an amazing architect, raising two daughters and a dog who outruns all three of us. I read more sci-fi and social science than design books, because I think the best frames for design come from somewhere else. I fuel my weekly runs with heaping bowls of Cap’n Crunch and way too many podcasts.
Dimensions of practice
- Spatial & Environmental
- Brand & Communication
- Experience & Interaction
- Service & Systems
- Innovation
- Product Strategy
- Consulting & Facilitation
Leadership
Principles of practice
Good design is good business
I bring business sense and systems thinking to the tension between human outcomes and financial reality. I stay in that tension. I don't resolve it reflexively in either direction. Design earns its seat by delivering for people and the business simultaneously. That's not a compromise. It's the fundamental design problem worth solving.
Lead from within
I'm most effective as a player-coach, close to the work, contributing as a peer and an authority. I take on the less glamorous parts so teammates can stretch. That proximity grounds my guidance in specificity. It keeps my teams oriented toward clear outcomes. Empowered to act. Supported in ways that make me a resource my teams actually want to use.
Candor drives craft
I treat the team environment as a design problem. I establish shared ownership, team norms, and rituals that make candor and critique the default, not the exception. Practitioners seek out others to make their ideas better. Hard conversations happen instinctively. Teams stop chasing a fractured sense of perfection. What replaces it is a shared definition of great work.
Find third ways
I approach cross-functional relationships as investments, not negotiations. Understanding the priorities, challenges, and key measures other leaders are after enables open exchanges, direct challenges, and co-creation. Co-creation that produces something neither side could have reached alone. This allows service design's influence to take root across functions and disciplines. No formal authority required.
People are the practice
I view coaching as a core part of my practice. I use a co-active approach, designing relationships around the priorities that matter to practitioners, not the ones I think they should have. The result is people who stop looking for answers and start finding them. Who stop coming back for approval and start coming back with what they learned.
Background
Experience
June 2021 – Present
Lead Service Designer · Harmonic Design
Aug 2018 – May 2021
Innovation & Experience Director · Signal Theory
Nov 2014 – July 2018
Associate Creative Director · Signal Theory
Jan 2013 – Oct 2014
Senior Art Director · Sullivan Higdon & Sink
June 2011 – Jan 2013
Senior Art Director · VML
June 2007 – June 2011
Art Director · Sullivan Higdon & Sink
April 2006 – June 2007
Art Director · VML
September 2004 – April 2006
Graphic Designer · BNIM Architects