Supporting the Calling:
Exploring how Human-Centered Design could improve the basement space of Hyer Hall at SMU for the Mathematics Department. Our team was asked to investigate how the environment could better serve the students who worked there and identify ways to transform the space into something more functional and community-oriented.
Duration
Aug 2025 - May 2026
Client
Highland Park Presbyterian Church - Dallas, TX
My Role
In a group of graphic designers, tech experts, and design thinkers, I contributed to:
Conducting user research and interviews
Identifying behavioral patterns within the space
Developing design hypotheses and prototypes
Testing spatial interventions
Synthesizing insights and presenting recommendations
My focus was on ensuring that the design decisions were grounded in actual student behavior rather than assumptions.
The Problem
Pastors are called to lead, teach, and care for their congregations. But running a church also requires managing finances, coordinating staff and volunteers, overseeing facilities, and building effective organizational systems.
How might we address knowledge gaps for pastors so that the church can have effective business models?
While seminaries prepare pastors for the spiritual responsibilities of ministry, many provide limited required training in the business and operational side of running a church. As a result, pastors often learn these responsibilities through trial and error, rely on others to fill knowledge gaps, or develop informal systems that are difficult for the entire team to understand.
For a small church with only one staff member, a pastor might be responsible for everything from preparing a sermon to managing the budget.
The challenge: How can churches build healthier, more effective operational systems without asking pastors to become business professionals?
Define
Understand
I began by exploring how pastors understand and prioritize the business side of their roles. Through secondary research, interviews with pastors and business professionals, mind mapping, and card-sorting exercises, I investigated the relationship between traditional pastoral responsibilities and organizational management.
I explored questions such as:
What business responsibilities do pastors manage in their day-to-day work?
Which responsibilities do they feel prepared to handle?
How do pastors prioritize operational tasks alongside their ministry?
Where do gaps emerge between what a team knows, what it does, and what it needs?
What I Learned
Pastors rely on others to fill knowledge gaps.
Staff members, volunteers, elders, deacons, and congregation members often contribute expertise that helps keep the church running.
Calling and operations can feel at odds.
Pastors are drawn to the work of ministry, yet they must also manage the systems that make that work possible.
Business responsibilities are often deprioritized.
Pastors recognize that finances, operations, and human resources are important, but the demands of ministry often take precedence in their day-to-day work.
Church business is different from traditional business.
Church leaders must balance financial and operational stewardship with congregational care, discipleship, prayer, and sermon preparation.
Key Insights
The problem wasn't simply that pastors lacked business knowledge. It was that the responsibilities, processes, and institutional knowledge needed to run a church were often unclear or distributed across the team.
The Pivot
My initial solution was a business training program that would help lead pastors learn from executive pastors and develop stronger operational skills.
But when I shared this concept with pastors, I discovered a significant barrier: they were interested in learning, yet reluctant to add another training to already full schedules. Many also felt their existing systems worked well enough.
This challenged my original assumption.
Instead of teaching pastors more about business, what if I helped them better understand the systems they already had?
The opportunity shifted from delivering business education to helping church teams surface institutional knowledge, clarify responsibilities, identify gaps, and align around shared goals.
Imagine and Refine
I designed a four-step workshop that guides a church team through mapping and evaluating a real organizational process.
1. Map the process
Participants identify the key steps in a process and place them on a timeline, creating a shared view of how the work currently happens.
2. Surface responsibilities
Each participant adds their individual tasks to the timeline. This reveals the work happening behind the scenes and makes responsibilities visible to the entire team.
3. Identify gifts and skills
Participants identify the tasks that align with their skills, expertise, and interests. This helps the team recognize existing strengths and consider where people could support one another.
4. Identify gaps and opportunities
The team steps back to examine the full process, discuss unclear ownership, identify overlaps and gaps, and brainstorm ways to make the system more effective.
What participants would take away
A visual map of the process from beginning to end
A shared understanding of who is responsible for each step
Greater visibility into the team's existing skills and expertise
Identified gaps, overlaps, and opportunities to redistribute work
Recommended next steps for improving the process
Following the workshop, the facilitator synthesizes the discussion into a summary of the process, key findings, and recommended next steps.
The workshop revealed three important things
Hidden work became visible.
Participants gained a clearer picture of the responsibilities involved in a process, including work they hadn't realized others were doing.
The team could discuss gaps without assigning blame.
Making everyone's contributions visible created a more constructive starting point for identifying inefficiencies and opportunities for change.
Alignment was a bigger challenge than expected.
Although the team agreed on the broader purpose of community groups, participants struggled to agree on where the process itself began and ended. They needed to distinguish the long-term spiritual goal from the immediate, measurable outcome of the operational process.
Make
I piloted the workshop with a four-person church team consisting of two full-time staff members, one part-time staff member, and one volunteer.
The team mapped its process for connecting people with community groups. Using a shared timeline, color-coded sticky notes, and stickers to identify skills and strengths, participants worked together to make the process visible.
The visual format was intentional. Instead of beginning with what was broken, the workshop began by acknowledging what each person was already contributing.
As the team added its responsibilities to the timeline, participants could see how much work was happening behind the scenes. They began asking questions about ownership, workload, and where responsibilities might be shared differently.
The pilot demonstrated that the workshop could surface misalignment, clarify hidden responsibilities, and create opportunities for collaborative problem-solving.
Participants left with a better understanding of the process and actionable ideas for improving it.
However, testing also revealed opportunities to strengthen the workshop.
What worked
The visual timeline helped participants understand how individual responsibilities connected.
The activity created space to recognize the work people were already doing.
The skills exercise helped the team discuss strengths and potential support without focusing only on workload.
Participants became more comfortable identifying gaps when they could see the full process.
What I would change
Establish a shared goal before mapping.
The team spent significant time trying to define the endpoint of the community-group process. Agreeing on a measurable process goal beforehand would create more time for identifying improvements.
Introduce prework.
Individual conversations with participants ahead of time would help the facilitator understand existing responsibilities and guide the discussion more effectively.
Clarify the purpose of the skills exercise.
Participants sometimes interpreted the exercise as volunteering to take on more tasks. Future iterations would emphasize identifying expertise and potential sources of support, rather than automatically redistributing ownership.
Test
The workshop showed that organizational effectiveness does not always require new training, additional resources, or a complete system overhaul. Sometimes, teams need a better way to see and understand the systems they already have.
By making responsibilities visible and creating shared understanding, church teams can identify opportunities to reduce duplicated work, clarify ownership, and build processes that are less dependent on individual people.
The long-term recommendation was to refine the workshop with prework and clearer process goals, then test it with churches of different sizes and resource levels. The approach could also be explored with other mission-driven organizations that rely on informal systems and distributed leadership.
Impact
The pilot demonstrated the potential to:
Improve clarity around roles and responsibilities
Surface institutional knowledge that might otherwise remain hidden
Create opportunities for more collaborative decision-making
Help teams identify more sustainable ways to distribute work
Free leaders to focus more intentionally on their primary calling
Key Takeaways
This project changed how I think about organizational problem-solving. What initially looked like a knowledge gap turned out to be an opportunity to improve the way people understand and work within a shared system.
Listen before designing. Research challenged my initial assumption that more business training was the answer.
Make the invisible visible. Visualizing responsibilities helped the team identify gaps and understand the work happening across the process.
Design for alignment, not just efficiency. A process cannot function effectively if the people responsible for it don't share an understanding of its goals.
Build on existing strengths. Teams already hold valuable knowledge and expertise; design can help them recognize and use it more effectively.
Most importantly, this project reinforced my belief that human-centered design can help organizations create systems that support people, rather than adding complexity to their work.