Jonathan Kalinowski

Jonathan Kalinowski

Founder, convivial—small, by design.

Jonathan is the founder of convivial, a hands-on practice in Raleigh, working with small businesses across the Triangle.

A decade-plus inside Fortune 500s, global consultancies, and heavily regulated industries trained his eye for what works in a small business and what doesn't. Before convivial, he built innovation and service design capabilities at Estée Lauder, MetLife, and Alliant Credit Union, and worked as a service designer at Fjord. He co-founded Service Experience Chicago and has published in Touchpoint. He holds an MFA in Service Design from SCAD.

His current work centers on what enterprise design practices can learn from small businesses and smallness as a design philosophy.

Small, By Design

The CX software market is $15B+ and growing, with 80%+ of organizations expecting to compete primarily on CX. Yet Forrester’s 2025 CX Index found 21% of brands saw scores dip last year, only 6% improved.

Small businesses create, by virtue of their smallness, conditions UX teams spend enormous sums simulating inside large organizations: proximity to the user; front-line empowerment; aligned intent; tight feedback loops; and recovery through relationship. A lot of what we build (personas, journey maps, insights) is expensive mimicry for what small businesses do naturally.

Drawing on field research with Triangle small businesses and the human-scale tradition (Meadows, Illich, Kohr, Schumacher, Beer), this talk argues smallness is a set of design principles, not just a category of business.