👋 Hi!
I’m Inés Bernal and this is my portfolio.
It reflects my practice as a service and strategic designer, developed through work in contexts where challenges are multi layered and not fully defined from the start.
The projects below show how I approach my work, drawing on qualitative research, careful framing, collaboration and judgment, with a strategic lens that values realism over quick wins.
Project 1
Master Thesis — Strategic and Systemic Design
Fall 2024 to Spring 2025, 25 weeks
I developed this graduation project to explore how design can support organisations in navigating complex societal transitions, using the protein transition as a tangible and urgent context. I approached the challenge systemically, not focusing solely on individual behaviour, but considering how experiences, narratives, and organisational decisions interact to enable or hinder change. The project took place in collaboration with Livework Studio and WWF NL, and I aimed to identify ways organisations can guide dietary change that feel realistic, meaningful, and emotionally aware.
Access full report here.
Framing and desk research
I started with extensive literature and desk research to build a solid foundation. I engaged with work on sustainability transitions, systemic and social design, and behavioural dynamics. The emerging concept of transition pain, describing the discomfort people experience when familiar practices and identities are challenged, strongly influenced my approach. This research framed my focus on letting go, unmaking, and designing for loss as well as change.
Systemic Research and Analysis
I explored the Dutch protein landscape to identify structural barriers and leverage points. Through interviews, I understood how some stakeholders perceived change as too slow while lacking clear resources or knowledge to accelerate it. This exposed the uncertainty and limited operational knowledge in the field, shaping how I designed interventions that could work within these constraints.
Behavioural and experiential research
I conducted qualitative research with users to capture ambivalence, resistance, and identity-related tensions. These insights informed interventions that are emotionally attuned and contextually grounded, moving beyond behaviourist simplifications.
Strategy Development
Based on the research, I developed a design framework to help organisations reflect on systemic challenges. The framework guides consideration of narratives, actor relationships, and structural constraints, offering directions for discussion and experimentation rather than ready-made solutions.
Co-Creation and Facilitation
I prepared and facilitated ideation sessions with Livework Studio practitioners and users. Through how might we exercises and quick prototyping, these sessions surfaced ideas and insights, helping refine the approach and identify what might realistically work within the campus context. Preparing materials and guiding the sessions allowed me to shape the conversation and capture actionable insights.
Design Delivery and Validation
I produced a comprehensive thesis document connecting theory and design implications. Visual frameworks, system maps, and facilitation materials were complemented by validation sessions with stakeholders and users to assess clarity, relevance, and practical feasibility.
The tangible outputs are seven interventions designed for exnovation in the protein transition within a university campus. They operate at multiple levels of the system: addressing behavioural mechanisms, strengthening relationships between actors, and tackling structural barriers identified in research. The focus was on creating conditions conducive to change rather than attempting to solve the transition outright.
- A central trade-off guided the project: I prioritised feasibility and coherence over immediate visibility, proposing interventions that may appear modest initially but could realistically be adopted and sustained. Several tensions remained unresolved, such as balancing emotional sensitivity with dominant behaviourist paradigms, and these informed the design decisions without being fully resolved.
- This project crystallised my understanding of how design can operate in complex transitions. It offered a first glimpse into navigating uncertainty, making decisions under incomplete knowledge, and leveraging design to create conditions for change. It reinforced that design in systemic contexts requires patience, judgment, and the ability to work with constraints, discomfort, and ambiguity.
- Overall, the work demonstrates my approach: building interventions grounded in insight, focusing on meaningful change over visibility, and using facilitation, framing, and judgment as core design tools rather than relying on prescriptive solutions.
Project 2
NO WOMAN LEFT BEHIND: REDESIGNING MATERNAL AND NEWBORN CARE SERVICES
Professional Project — Design Research & Service Design
Multidisciplinary, international collaboration
Spring 2024
Context & Intent
This project took place within a large scale public health initiative funded by the World Bank and the Global Financing Facility, and led by the Royal Tropical Institute in collaboration with Design Innovation Group and international research partners. The aim was to improve maternal and newborn care services through a Service Delivery Redesign approach, addressing persistent delays in access to quality emergency obstetric and neonatal care.
During my internship at Design Innovation Group, I contributed to the formative research and service design work for Niger, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The project centred women’s lived experiences while recognising the structural, cultural, and economic conditions shaping access to care. From the outset, I approached the work with caution and humility, aware that my role was not to interpret experiences through my own lens, but to support their careful and responsible translation into design inputs.
My Roles & Responsibilities
Research Synthesis and sensemaking
I supported the analysis and synthesis of qualitative interviews conducted by local research partners. Working with indirect and incomplete data, I focused on identifying patterns without filling gaps through assumption. This meant staying close to what was said, resisting over interpretation, and respecting cultural contexts that I could not fully know from a distance.
Service Design Artefacts
I translated qualitative insights into service design artefacts such as user journeys and personas. These were used as boundary objects to complement quantitative data and support shared understanding across multidisciplinary teams. The artefacts helped make systemic barriers, emotional drivers, and care seeking behaviours visible without simplifying or stereotyping lived realities.
Facilitation support
I supported the preparation and facilitation of dry-run ideation sessions ahead of in-country workshops.
I helped defining the structure of activities and materials to ensure insights from women and healthcare providers remained central to the redesign process.
Outcome & Key Takeaways
The outputs of this project informed service redesign efforts aimed at improving maternal and newborn care pathways in fragile contexts. While the scope of the work could not address the deep rooted structural causes of inequality, it contributed to a more grounded and human understanding of where and how services fail women in critical moments.
- Working with testimonies of extreme vulnerability was emotionally demanding and, at times, confronting. It made the limits of design intervention tangible, and highlighted the ethical responsibility involved in translating suffering into abstract models and decisions. At the same time, contributing to work that sought to improve dignity, quality, and access, even incrementally, reinforced my commitment to careful, responsible service design in public and social sectors.
- This project strengthened my ability to collaborate across disciplines and cultures, work responsibly with partial data, and support decision making without over claiming certainty or impact.
Project 3
INCREASING REPRESENTATION: FROM ALIENATION TO INTUITIVE ORGANISATIONAL INTERACTIONS
Academic Case Study — Strategic & Service Design
Team of 5
Fall 2023, 10 weeks
Context & Intent
This project was developed in collaboration with Directie X, an innovation unit within the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. The initial brief focused on improving diversity and inclusion to enable more representative decision making. Early in the project, we collectively challenged this framing, questioning where the brief originated and what it was attempting to fix.
Through research with employees across organisational levels, we reframed the challenge as a broader issue of organisational alienation. Rather than treating diversity and inclusion as isolated objectives, we examined how complexity, hierarchy, and rigid ways of working distance people from their work, from each other, and from the societal impact of their decisions.
My Roles & Responsibilities
PROBLEM REFRAMING and SYSTEMS ANALYSIS
I contributed to qualitative research through interviews and field conversations with ministry employees. Together with the team, I synthesised findings into systemic models that positioned diversity and inclusion as symptoms of deeper organisational dynamics. Drawing on theories of organisational complexity and wicked problems, we explored how institutional structures unintentionally produce exclusion and disengagement.
STRATEGIC DIRECTION and future vision
I co-developed a future vision centred on more intuitive and human organisational interactions. This vision translated abstract systemic issues into opportunity areas across workflows, decision making processes, and everyday organisational practices. The focus was not on proposing a single solution, but on outlining a direction that could be explored incrementally.
Co-Creation and Facilitation
I contributed to the design and facilitation of a co creation session with Directie X employees. The session was used to test assumptions, build ownership, and explore what change could realistically look like within the constraints of a large and historically entrenched public institution.
Outcome & Key Takeaways
The project resulted in a phased strategic proposal outlining how organisational change could begin within a protected environment and gradually expand. Rather than promising transformation at scale, the strategy acknowledged institutional inertia and positioned experimentation as a necessary first step.
- Working within a small innovation unit inside a large ministry made organisational resistance tangible. Existing ways of working, disciplinary homogeneity, and rigid output expectations constrained what could be proposed and how far ideas could be pushed. At the same time, the project demonstrated how strategic design can create space for reflection and gradual change even within highly bureaucratic contexts.
- This project strengthened my ability to challenge briefs, work collaboratively under ambiguity, and translate theory into strategic direction without losing sight of institutional realities.
Project 4
Revitalizing Mooncup: From Individual to Community narrative
Academic Case Study — Strategic Design
Team of 5
Fall 2023, 4 weeks
Context & Intent
This speculative strategic design project explored how Mooncup, a brand historically associated with a single product, could be repositioned in a saturated and culturally sensitive market. Without a client brief, the project was an intellectual exercise in applying strategic design to a taboo laden context, using menstruation as a lens to rethink value beyond products.
Rather than focusing on incremental product innovation, we aimed to expand the conversation around menstruation from an individual and private issue to a collective and social one. The intent was to explore how design could support cultural reframing through narrative, community, and shared experience.
My Roles & Responsibilities
Strategic Exploration and Framing
I contributed to research into cultural perceptions, market dynamics, and lived experiences related to menstruation. This work informed how we framed the challenge not as a product problem, but as a broader cultural and narrative opportunity.
Value proposition and narrative building
I played a key role in shaping the strategic direction and developing a new value proposition for Mooncup. Storytelling was central to this work. We crafted a narrative that positioned the brand as a facilitator of dialogue around discomfort, vulnerability, and shared experiences, rather than solely as a product provider.
Concept Development and Storytelling
The project culminated in the concept of Growing Pains, a speculative platform designed to host conversations and interactions around inevitable but often unspoken bodily experiences. The concept was intentionally narrative driven, using storytelling as the main mechanism for engagement rather than functional service features.
Outcome & Key Takeaways
The project demonstrated how strategic design can be used to reposition a brand by shifting the frame of value. By moving from an individual to a collective perspective, we explored how Mooncup could engage broader audiences and address societal taboos without relying on new product development.
- Feedback on the project highlighted both its strengths and its limits. While the narrative approach was seen as accessible and engaging, we were also challenged on the level of boldness in its application. In particular, focusing the concept within student environments was perceived as a safer choice compared to extending the conversation into professional contexts where taboos around menstruation are more deeply entrenched.
- This project reinforced my belief in storytelling as a powerful strategic tool. It showed how narrative can open space for dialogue on uncomfortable topics, while also underscoring the importance of consciously choosing where and how far to push a speculative proposal within limited time and scope.
inés bernal / Made with 🤍 / 2026
contact via ines@inesbernal.com or Linkedin