Gordon Ross

Vice President and Partner

Gordon helped launch OXD (then OpenRoad) in 1996 while still at university, designing and building some of the first websites in Canada. Much of his work since has been in the Canadian public sector, with the provinces of British Columbia and Alberta, the Yukon, and federal departments.

His practice has evolved over the decades: public-facing websites in the late 1990s, intranets through the 2000s, user research and experience design, then service design, and design for policy. Recent work includes an evaluation of Dubai government's digital services, supporting Connected Services BC, Alberta's Courts modernization, BC Parks' digital transformation, BC's COVID-19 response, Alberta's Digital Innovation Office, and Canadian Digital Services. The work that interests him most is where the service, the policy, and the technology turn out to be the same problem.

Gordon's writing has been published in Design Issues (MIT Press) and DMI:Review, and he has spoken at Service Design in Government, the Service Design Network's global conference, the Rosenfeld Civic Design Conference, and SXSW. He is a certified Cognitive Edge practitioner and uses narrative and sensemaking methods when working in complex problem domains.

He holds a degree in Communications from Simon Fraser University and has lectured at SFU, University of British Columbia (UBC), and British Columbia Institute of Technology (BCIT). He co-founded the Vancouver User Experience Group and has served on the Board of the Vancouver Public Library and Cycling BC.