Clusters of insights - quick access
- Need more people, more diverse and inclusive, more open
- Lack of space for honesty
- People are not sharing
Need more people, more diverse and inclusive, more open
Many participants expressed something around feeling rejected, having to chose a group, feeling that you need to put yourself out there in a goodlight, not feeling included or worthy. Can’t be honest.
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List of clusters of insights
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Hard to take part
- I know that there's loads of groups kind of meeting on Zoom, but as someone with [disability] this sort of communication is so exhausting
- It‘s fine for them being separate and having different names, it‘s just what is the aim of all of it? If there is a Thursday afternoon meeting for COVID-19 design team and then there is a Thursday midday meeting, why are they not the same thing? I don’t have that much time to attend these things. Like no one does. And it would be good to do.trying to do it digitally
- It seems like lots of different pockets of service design community in Scotland. That feels quite confusing
- Too many things and confusing, format not always inclusive (disability)
Disability / hard to keep up
- As someone with a disability, I feel extremely excluded from the service design community. I have enough of a problem working on a day-to-day basis and challenging... just creating a space for me to exist as myself. So, keeping in touch with the rest of the community is impossible
- I think it’s not inclusive at all
- I know there's the slack channel, which is useful but I think that I Feel a little overwhelmed by even dealing with my [organisations’] Teams, so Having another board where loads of stuff is written can be really hard
Lack of diverse voices
- An array of different perspectives and different abilities that come from working in different sectors under the guise of service design. [...] Engineers and doctors who are trained in that, it would be so much more beneficial cause we get other sides of the coin, and to have citizens’ represented and lots of different people
- If you take an inclusive design approach and you follow inclusive principles than chances are you are going to end up with something more accessible but it's not about getting an accessible output in particular
- If you look at the way women are involved in design, the way black and minorities ethnic groups are involved in design, because we are not inclusive we will design services that will cause them problems inadvertently
- Disabled people are another group we can't forget about in the design, and we don't think "what might this mean for them?" so inclusive design is more about thinking at that level and taking an approach that reduces the risk that you are going to create something that includes all
Only strategic level public & third sector practitioners in the community, not all the people involved in the delivery of the service
- [In existing communities] you have public and third sector people of a particular level. You don’t have the people on the whole delivering the services in that space talking about it. You have managers or strategic level people
Celebrating diversity
- We don’t all use the same language and we don't all use the same approach, but that's not something we celebrate
- How do we train and educate other people, support others, become more diverse and just step into totally different spheres? there is an issue on diversity. I don’t have a problem with other people developing it as long as they involve the right people
Loud voice / feeling like an outsider
- I feel like an outsider anyway, so to me it's amplified, other people might not feel like that because there are more involved in these communities but I feel this is very disparate, siloed, and the loss of knowledge and sharing happens because of that
- There are group of people creating things and then holding them, my ideal is that it's kind of more loosely associated and distributed leadership and that it's a more self organised ecosystem
- I feel almost excluded sometimes from that community because I don't have that approach things
- Our community is not inclusive at all. it's so difficult, and I feel often that I am on the outskirts of things. Which makes it really difficult to articulate your place
- They [previous colleagues they are still in touch with] are part of a wider communities and stuff, and again you feel quite isolated with things
- There are some cliques and fashion and groups, there's all these different things being set up, I think that's natural when the scene is this big. I think at some point it will settle until it changes again and becomes something else but at the moment it feels 'cliquey' it's like over here for these people, over there for these people
- It's really difficult to create those kind of networks, or to find your kind of niche within it, cause there’s a lot of really loud voices I think they help, and you know good for them for doing it, but yeah, it makes it difficult
Expectation: put oneself forward
- If you are on Twitter and you are following the kind of big names in the field, they are constantly networking and talking about the things that they are doing... and I can’t do that. And it’s not like I am not doing the work or it’s not innovative, but because we’ve created this space where we constantly have to put ourselves forward, it is not for everyone
Design rhetoric is frustrating, deceptive - need to look at what is really happening
- Being consistent with that and not being derogatory, you know, I'm right, you're wrong and trying to break, no, it's look, doing it that way will mean a stronger engagement, will make sure this things are more efficient, affected to the service it's meant to be, saving you money and time, there are going to do in the community, you know bullshit, it's not happening
- There is a lot of rhetoric and conversations and behaviours in some service design communities that I find frustrating so I don't tend to go there. But because some of these are local - national communities, I like to see what is being discussed just like ‘what's happening’ kind of thing
- Recently, we were talking about the service design network, and someone was ‘oh, it’s just like mutual masturbation. You know, people just go and praise each other about the work they are doing even without thinking critically about it. You know, it’s great that you managed to achieve something under quite difficult constraints, but yeah
Free to speak
- I'm glad not to be in a job where I have to watch my words and not to be tied to a company. I can shout and be a useful trouble maker, a nuisance, and say, "no it's wrong". Not for the sake of shouting, but backing that with evidence and throwing their words back at them. Because if you look at all these documentation they will pull out, what they say they are going to do in the community, you know bullshit, it's not happening
Arrogance: Service design is just one of the ingredients, need other perspectives, anyone contributing based on people's needs.
- Make it more inclusive and understand that our community should not just include us. Design is so non-inclusive and cliquy and just arrogant sometimes. Why on earth should we have a community of just service designers. Why don’t we just have a community of people who are contributing to change, based on people's needs
- We have such a focus on labels that maybe we just need to focus on not having those labels and just making it a space to talk about change. Yes using design tools, but also to have other perspectives in that as well. [...] We need to see the bigger picture here
Not enough designers
- Thinking of service design as a practice, to me I think the gaps are... it’s quite an emerging profession, particularly in Government. I think different practices have moved on at different paces. The gaps are that there aren’t enough. We can’t get a service designer for the love of our money
- We always say, you need a service designer, great, I don’t know how to get you one because recruitment processes are really difficult. To me the gap is just having the critical mass of people to be able to do the stuff that we know that needs to happen. That’s an issue. It is the skills gap in the market, definitely
- The community just needs more good designers who are not service designers. We need more interaction designers, content designers, people like that. [...] people [...] really well trained well experienced
Lack of space for honesty
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Lack of critique within the community because we're in survival mode
- I really wish there was more openness and bravery in the community. It feels like it's playing safe quite a lot. And maybe there are totally legit reason for that, for example like survival mode, like folk are out of work or they have too much work
Talk about failure
- we need to have more of a culture of that [sharing] which is a difficult thing, so more like a general, you can talk about things as opposed to having to make the space about: come and talk about your failures, or maybe that's a starting point, creating a space to do that
- I felt it was like therapeutical [broken sound] for service designers. Because actually I could hear that a lot of the issues that we have in our organisation are shared by others
- I often get out more around people saying these are the problems I'm facing, these are the two things I tried and didn't work, what do I do?
Don't share failure to avoid embarrassment when you're honest about what you do
- It’s hard, cause every time you speak to other service designers, or you look at the Scottish gov community or SAtSD, you feel a bit like you are doing it wrong, or you feel embarrassed of your own practice
- People who end up working in the public sector I really good service designers and are also ambitious. I can see how people really really want to show the good work that they've been doing but [...] then from all these like Grande examples [... ] I just sort of feel like, ‘well, yes I am not there, can't get there’, and I'm even more down on myself
Share research and start by looking what has been done before, instead of re-doing / being open if it's not good enough to drive good quality
- What was your methodology, who was your sample, how was your sample size? how did you go about selecting your sample? how did you remove bias, these are your kind of key chore questions you have to present. If you look at that and you go, pff... there is a problem here and you can articulate then you can start and do some primary research if it's not enough and then, you update it, so this becomes another solid research. The value with that is it drives good quality as well, because you start to see what good quality looks like. Whether it's the research that people are using, or it's the design patterns that the people are using and we are being clear and open about that. That is where it becomes really powerful, what can be achieved by taking this kind of approach but it's tough to do
- The first thing we should not be doing is jumping in and: "right! we need to find people to find some research with or we need to find some people to do design with". The first thing we should be doing is going: "has anybody done this before?" and we should be thinking about how we reuse that stuff. and there is a lot of work around how to do that, some of it is about metadata, some of it is about methodologies, some of it is about consistent approach
Share service patterns across sectors in a public and transaprent way
- Being honest show we have similar challenges, we can support each others when we are not quite there yet
- Biggest challenge we've got in that sort of space is doing the same thing again and again re-inventing the wheel, we're very bad at conducting the same research again, looking at designing the same patterns again, not reusing design patterns from different spaces and not thinking and kind of considering design patterns in different ways and how they might be applicable in different sectors or spaces
- Something around how we talk about service design but we also need to talk about this vast old systems that are letting us down a bit, and how to actually work with them. and seeing as no one has figured it out properly right now, that will involve a lot of complaining and that is ok. [...] I am glad that there is such a thing in the end of the day. I think we all face similar challenges, so we need to support each other a lot better. I'm really glad that there is a lot of people out there that are in a similar situation
- Thinking within research ops is kind of getting to that point where it's starting to go how do we share effects because this is going to be key part of what we do. We're not there yet in terms of tooling, in terms of architecture, in terms of people's thinking but we are starting to get there
Always celebrating, but where are the discussions on failure
- I'm not always wanting to celebrate. People are doing some fucking amazing things with service design but there is also space for failure, and there was a conversation going for a little bit with people who are in this service design network space that we're talking about that. We talked about doing fuck up nights forever, you just come and say "oh boy I fucked up, this is what happened ..." I really think there is a space for that of fragility at the moment in service design and people taking themselves so seriously
- We need more honesty about how things really went and share failures too
- There is something that is being maintained and sustained in meet up especially when they were happening, it is a place for case studies that are tied in a bow, "nobody was hurt along the way and it was just great" and we all know this is a piece of bullshit. [...] you would never see that from the person on the stage saying "oh boy that was bad, and I totally messed up"
- A platform like that is public, transparent, open data platform as much as we possibly can, obviously we put aggregated anonymised data so that it's completely anonymous and we connect people into that, we actively promoted people to join in there and encourage people to dump stuff. Because if we don't, what we will end up is everybody, everywhere, every local authority goes off and design services, every GP and NHS services goes off and design some appointments and booking systems, now i'm not saying it's a one size fits all and we should just be: "here is the one appointment booking system" and everybody connect into that, but there is a scope to actually be looking at stuff and well actually, we know how the design pattern works in here, if we need to buy one, it needs to look like this, there all the requirements, we know what the design pattern looks like or we've got a bloody good idea what it looks like and it's stuff like that where the value is
People are not sharing
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List of clusters of insights for NOT sharing
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Already so much out there
- There are gazillion blogs. if I have learn something, I will have found it somewhere else or I've gone searching and I pull together a couple of strands [...] why would I go and do a blog, it's already on there! [...]. I have done a blog in the past, and it's regurgitating the same old crap and I'm not really interested
Can't share what doesn't work
- We need to have a lot more knowledge and learning to be able the share something
- Sharing of when things don't work as well or when things are, for whatever reason, when things might have been successful but somewhere along, you still had learning along the way, being more open about things like that as well. We ran an event on failure a couple of years ago, with SDN, in Glasgow, it was odd to think about failure as well, and being quite open and honest where things had gone wrong and the amount of people who came to that as well, because of that reason? No project is perfect, nothing you do is ever perfect, you just kind of, the whole ethos of how we work is kind of do things, trial it and iterate right? so in order to do that you need to look at what doesn't work so more of that
- We need to be talking about what works but most importantly about what doesn't work, and to be really open and honest about that. And I just think that we don't make enough time to do that, blogging, and be really honest. Cause again, I think there's a confidence element there... you know, nobody wants to say the thing we told people to do didn’t work in this context. [...] I think in some areas yes, in some areas no. If it came down to tools and methods, definitely. But you have to be very careful around corporate and reputation risk
Can't share because they don't think they have something worth sharing yet
- It feels very difficult to share learning because we are not very confident in what we are doing. We are doing such basic things. I would be really surprised if anyone would be able to learn a lot from it. In terms of how to work with a big system, We are far away from success
Can't share the negative because it's too new and they want people to trust the process
- I think that’s a maturity thing. Because this is something quite new and we are trying to get people engaged in it, it is right to be cautious about how we talk about it. Working in many ways is always never working for people there's a risk in it and you have got to trust the process
Can't share because of NDA
- I do a lot less public sharing of things. It's because of a mix of things, it's harder to share clients stuff, especially now as I can't share anything about my current project, so then because you're limited by that, so it's time but also the effort for getting out what you can say
Walled garden
- There isn’t a whole lot of sharing. I think that on occasions, people try to build walls around - walled gardens within the international community of service design. I understand why they do it, and everyone’s got to make money to survive. But I think that's more important if we could create free and open connections between people. That's how people learn I think, and that's the ethos that we should go forward with
- At the moment, I don't feel that [there is shared ownership of the community], I feel there are a handful of people or groups of people wanting to create walled-garden, or "this is our design community here". It's very counter intuitive, because if you are working in the spirit of service design, that would not line up so well. Some groups have the right way and the quick way, and all the things. There are some people in the community that are put on pedestals without interrogating them at all, it's just about visibility, who gets to be seen, who's story gets to be told