What the project is about
This project started with a tweet in June 2020. We teamed up to collect stories of Service Design in the public and third sectors in Scotland. We started an interview study and discussed with 15 practitioners in Scotland how to better support, grow and build up the service design community in Scotland.
We focussed on the Public and Third Sectors in Scotland initially, but this can be explored further.
This is about Service Design practice, which is wider than just service designers.
Only half of our interviewees self-identified as service designers or had Service Designer as their job title.
Other practitioners using service design approaches had roles in user research, accessibility, community engagement, user experience design and design training.
Who we are
We are 4 service designers living and working in Scotland passionate about our practice and with the aim of bringing the service design community together by sharing experiences and learnings and discussing the future. Learn more about us
- Angela F. Orviz
- Serena Nüsing
- Stéphanie Krus
- Vinishree Verma
Note: we are doing this on our personal time and have no funding.
The interview guide used to gather the initial data
Context, your story
- Professional background and your involvement working with SD
- In the time you have worked in this space, how has it evolved?
- Have you heard of the Scottish Approach to Service Design? And if so, what does it mean to you?
Current practice and lessons learnt
- What can you tell us about the contributions that SD brings to your area of work? Do you manage to design WITH people?
- If yes: tell us about it, any new things you have learnt from doing so.
- If No, is it something you would like to do, what’s preventing you to do it
- Do you have any other thoughts on the barriers to the incorporation of SD in your area?
- Are there any gaps in the SD approach?
- Have you identified any gaps in the skills of designers or the people they work with?
Building skills and collaborations
- What network do you use to keep in touch with other SD? / How do you connect and keep in touch, build collaborations with other people practicing in the area?
- Are there any skills or knowledge that you would like to develop further? And if so, what do you read, and where do you go to learn more or train?
- Do you share your work or learning with other practitioners? If so, where and how do you do so?
The future
- Where would you like to see the relationship between the public/third sector and SD in the future?
- Where should the community concentrate its efforts?
The process we followed
- We transcribed interviews to keep the original wording and avoid early interpretations
- We coded interviews by labelling each quote with a meaningful phrase and grouping them into 11 high level themes, each one becoming a tab in a Google spreadsheet
- Next, each tab/theme has been reviewed and the groupings added as post it on Miro which allowed us to work in a more visual way and identify patterns
- On Miro, we took only the relevant bits of quotes, reviewing the sub-code, codes and grouping, new groupings and insights emerged
- We finally ended up with 5 big themes, each outlining challenges as well as a future vision
More about the process in this Medium post
Sharing our research
This website (started on the 05/02/21) is a new way to share the research we did as an alternative to the big Miro board we have. Let us know how we can make it better for you.
- Learn how to use this website
- Learn more about the project in this Medium post
- Access more posts and other communications about the project