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Clara Atwell
Designing strategy that reflects you.
I'm Clara Atwell (she/her). I help leaders across technology, philanthropy, and government turn moments of change into strategies their people (staff, stakeholders, & community) recognize themselves in.
// WHAT I'M UP TO
LOCATION
FOCUS
THINKING ABOUT
Currently living in Seattle, WA
Strategic planning, qualitative research, framework development, and creative facilitation for organizations that take their stakeholders seriously.
Regenerative design, community-centered design, AI ethics, my all-time favorite framework
// STRATEGY WORK
STRATEGIC PLANNING
How do we move towards a future of thriving forests in a moment when public lands have become political?
OUR TASK
Amid dramatic cuts to the U.S. Forest Service budget and personnel, the National Forest Foundation came to Intentional Futures with a question: How do we build a 2040 vision that holds? The answer needed to center forest health and resonate with foresters, USFS officials, and corporate partners alike.
HOW I SUPPORTED
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Facilitating and synthesizing 20+ interviews across the forest ecosystem with board, staff, and USFS officials
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Designing decks and activities to support two envisioning workshops with staff and board respectively
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Connecting mission, vision, and values development to what surfaced in interviews and workshops
CROSS-CULTURAL UX RESEARCH
Open Source Skilling Research
What barriers keep geographically diverse open source contributors from becoming life-long contributors?
OUR TASK
Like many domains of tech, life-long open source contributors are often white, Western, and male. A global open source organization came to Intentional Futures to analyze the physical and cultural barriers and solutions to expanding participation in open source ecosystems across North America, Europe, Brazil, South Africa.
HOW I SUPPORTED
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Designing and facilitating four global focus groups and interviews across North America, Southern Africa, Brazil, and Europe
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Independently leading interview synthesis for the report's challenges section
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Co-creating the open source upskilling journey framework through an equity lens
HUMAN-CENTERED ENVISIONING
Agentic AI in Aging
How can we use design to envision a future where agentic AI is trusted, secure, and enables agency for older adults?
OUR TASK
In a moment when AI is rapidly reshaping how people use the internet and disrupting business models, fear is often the driving force between an organization's choice to innovate or abstain from AI usage.
In this client's organization, both existed in parallel. They hired my team to help their organization bridge technical gaps, filter through AI-hype, and find shared spaces of agreement to support them in making informed decisions about agentic AI's risks and opportunities for their stakeholders.
HOW I SUPPORTED
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Leading and synthesizing interviews with stakeholders at a national member-based nonprofit and external agentic AI experts to surface the organization's biggest opportunities and open risks
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Designing agentic AI use cases centered on the organization's mission and values — supporting older adults and their caregivers through their aging journey
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Proposing an overarching agentic AI strategy that reconciled internal disagreement over pace of adoption and business model risk, anchoring the organization's path forward in its role as a trusted source
