Clusters of insights - quick access
- Who with? How big
- Networking - Events - Keeping in touch
- Sharing vs not sharing - What, Why and Where?
Who with? How big?
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List of clusters of insights
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Shaping our own communities
- I shape my own kind of communities [...] since lockdown, I've had a weekly check-in with a group of people [...]. We had an online book discussion [...] we meet every week now [...] there is a social worker, a participatory artist, and a design research lecturer... and we just have the most rich amazing like quite emotional conversations, and I don't think any of us feel very welcome in set design communities, so we have our own back channel conversations. I meet another group via Twitter for cocktail every Friday afternoon, and again it's very rich and if I had to guess, that's another group of people who feel like rejects from 'organised spaces'
- I keep in touch with People at my [organisation], who also do design in health, but is very ad-hoc. We have a WhatsApp group and we Usually video call every once in a while and share papers
Local community
- The thing initially was right let's build a community in Dundee of people... and that's how we got to know people like in the NHS and in local government, people in local College, in the service design Academy, etc [...] so yeah, creating networks in your own locality I think it is really important
International community
- Design Justice Network [...] in the UK node only four of us really actively involved we are meeting regularly there and having really interesting conversations, both within the UK and globally. It’s quite a challenging space, an interesting challenge
- I am proud to live in Scotland and what's happening in Scotland. I've always described myself as an internationalist. I think it's really important to have an internationalist view and those kind of connections are being inspired by what people are doing in different countries and to work with them
- I try to be active in various networks and going along to events [...] It's really important [...] being inspired by what people are doing in different countries and to work with them. That's why things like Service Design in Government is good. But also,... just staying in touch by social media with people all around the world, I think that in our field it's vitally important
Too many different tools, too many dots to join to make a real community
- Someone is using slack, and someone else is using Miro and someone else is writing a nice Coop-digital blog how do you connect all in one place
- What even is the service design community in Scotland?
Beyond design: communities that engage in the debates that Service Design is lacking
- I love Slack a lot but I would not call them service design communities but they are broader design communities excluding visual design so there is a lot of talk into my ecosystem every day about things that would be related to design equity, from every angles, so the pedagogy, the equity in research practices, equity in learning design at a community level, equity in sharing credit, sharing profits, all this kind of things. A lot of discussion about things like algorithmic injustice, hard coding discriminations, I'm not technical but I find these sort of things very useful to reframe
- In the service design community itself, I've almost stepped back from it a little bit and kind of enjoy Communities that are not service design. you know like enjoy people doing stuff around social impact, and some other stuff I’m doing around drug addiction and those are communities I find interesting
Reaching a wider community
- What was interesting was the overlap in terms of approach and ideas, and how we were looking to approach things was quite surprising the extent of the overlap and the opportunity for learning, so what i'm interested in that sense of shared learning, what mature discipline exist that are working in similar ways, as they are working with people, they are trying to design things and so forth, but they are so much more mature in terms of profession that they maybe have more or clearer ideas and opportunities, so architecture, building designers, and landscape design
- There needs to be something much broader that gives us a platform to talk to the wider community that are also interested. I’m not sure what that is at the moment other than us trying to get our story out there
Networking - Events - Keeping in touch
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List of clusters of insights
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How to chose an event? Too many thing so people have strategies to pick an event
- Gathering the energy to figure out which one to attend. the variety of stuff and not sure what is what. what‘s most beneficial for me to attend. some form of learning sessions between the community would be quite useful
- If I want to meet somebody, whether it's somebody who is a good practitioner or if it's a peer, a community person that I know there are, particularly [in the cities where I work]
- Following people on twitter to keep an eye on what is happening in the community, and whenever possible attending meet-ups
- There is a Slack channel, which seems to be used by a lot of government people, I think it‘s called COVID-19 design team I don’t know where this came from. It was extremely confusing. There is this Service Design Scotland one from Open Change. Then there are other events happening. Maybe if this is just an issue of everything going digital and everyone is trying to do it digitally
Meet up
- Something quite casual is useful. For sure a meet up
- Something quite open where people can join or not join. Cos I think it's really difficult for people, being in control of your own time
- It's hard to remember the last time I was at a meetup. It's not really where I would make these connections
- 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
Slack
- We’ve been really slow on establishing even a slack channel to come together. Covid was really the impetus to make that happen cause we absolutely needed it at that point, it just felt like all of those barriers fell. that’s a good start. Just for people to be able to talk and to be present
- I sit quietly in the background of the slack community
- I find the SG one super helpful and I’m actually learning stuff. this one feels much more practice orientated, and deep in service design stuff. The talent in the [SG one] is insane. I did check that I could join it, because I know that I am not a civil servant. I enjoy this, I enjoy the practice and the real depth
- The other one [SDS] feels more like a community network, which is great
- Across the team, we have lot of things across our teams through social channels like slack
Network/ events
- Our company has invested so much time and money in running [community] stuff but we have stepped back now because there is other people doing it really well. there’s actually a really cool community here. We’ll be part of it
- Design Justice Network. [...] in the UK node only four of us really actively involved we are meeting regularly there and having really interesting conversations, both within the UK and globally. It’s quite a challenging space, an interesting challenge
- Now it's kind of the reverse of what it was, it's more Zoom and less face to face
Mailing list
- There are a few email lists in which I participate, or mostly not as it's tiring to participate when you get the same question every 6 months
- The one way I mostly keep in touch is twitter, that’s my go to thanks to algorithms I get a sense of being able to keep up with people I’m really interested in and I interact more
- One place that I probably observe more than I interact is twitter
- I never miss an opportunity to keep my mouth shut, and for me to just to see what is going on is really just to assess whether or not I want to interact with something
- Twitter is the place of the loud voices - this is link to the challenges
Keep in touch with people they worked with previously
- I make a point of staying in touch with people who I have worked with in the past, as well as recognising people I have work with. I would not have managed without maintaining that kind of network out of the workplace, and the fact that this is actually leading to business opportunities
- It's really difficult to develop your skills and to be in a space where there are other job opportunities. So I find it really difficult and quite isolating. [...] I am quite lucky that I had some great colleagues [in the past] who I’ve been able to stay in touch with them
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)
Sharing vs not sharing - What, Why and Where?
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What type of things they share
- What they are learning, trying
- Case studies
- What they are working on
- What they are reading
- Highlights, amplify good practice, good people
Where things are shared
- In blogs, articles and cases studies
- Conferences
- Speaking at events
- Sharing learning with peers internally
- Informal sharing
- Social media, emails
Why they are not sharing
(This is more part of the challenges but interesting to see here as well)
- They think they don’t have something worth sharing
- Afraid to share the negative
- Because or NDA (Non Disclosure Agreement) or consultant status
- There is something around ethics and being open, who gets to be seen and who’s story we are telling
List of clusters of insights for sharing
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Blogs, articles and cases studies
- I write blog posts, I read other people’s blog post. I always try to share my knowledge. And that’s something I spend more and more time on over the last years
- I blog, when we are learning something or trying different things out
- Trying to write more and share that
- I am writing up our case studies [...] or I can at least bring them to life
- I feel there is maybe a bit of a missed opportunity. We always talk about cases studies... whatever that looks like, to me it’s a way of saying ‘this isn’t just an academic approach’
- sharing takes time
- I think GDS did it really well. They blogged about everything that they did. But they dedicated and invested a lot of time into that, it didn't just happen by accident
Conferences
- If I was working in an environment which has more cash, it would be conferences as well. We don't! although there is scope to go to a couple conferences when they start up again
- Give presentations probably at every service design government conference, and it's all about what we've learnt doing what we are doing. [...] A workshop on 'this is what we learnt and we are sharing it with you'
Speaking at events
- We did talks at BIMA, SDN and things like that, and maybe also more online
- I didn’t really get that many speaking opportunities in the UK, [...] recently, because once you are more vocal you then get more invitations [...] I do a lot more speaking now, and I get my head around what feels like a narrative. So that’s been really, given me confidence to easily say yes [...] But then you have to be careful cause you start realising that people come to the same talk and you have got the same thing to say, and I thought, maybe I should get something else
Sharing learning with peers internally
- We have like an internal team working on SD on different parts of the business and how to bringing in how you create a baseline of what is SD, we created an internal playbook and things like that. So if you are new to SD and you are joining a project and you want to know how to go about it, they have some kind of reference
- I’m not very good on social media. So it’s generally across teams or through conversations. I have lots of friends and peers I speak to
- All these different tools, it's interesting to see what other people use. So that group [UX community of practice] is very good at project specific sharing, but also design methods and methodology and how other people work.[...], based on some research or it could be a very digital [...]or they might do something completely random
- We have UX community of practice [...] product design, service design and user research [...] we have a Slack channel where we talk every day about the project we are working on and then each week, [...] a weekly meeting for 1.5h and it's the community of practice and we take turns in chairing the meeting. It could be practical about a project you're working on [...], based on some research or it could be a very digital [...] or they might do something completely random
- I do share a lot of my work and insights with other user researchers. I find that much more accessible, because you have the common language of insights. So that's much easier to share because they’re not you, they are your tool and they’re your findings so therefore that’s a lot easier to discuss. So I do actively share that with the community of practice
- My team I set up like “learning lunches”. We’re doing one next week because I‘ve been almost half through the book “good services” by Lou. So, everything I‘m learning from this book, I‘m putting on a slide show and I‘m just going to chat them through. That‘s just a way I share my learnings with the team within the organisation
Informal sharing
- There are some positive communities like on Slack, like the SDS as a way to connect with people, which is always good, it's nice to do, I think it's good to have a mix of things as well? so it's not always formal, these things are more informally, kind of go along, everybody has a chance to chat, meet people, and that's quite different from going to a talk, a workshop or a conference where you go to keep and absorb as oppose to share? Maybe more of that kind of stuff actually, where you can collaboratively share things, in an informal way, that would be nice
- Informal because of lack of time
- If we got a delivery cycle, the last part of that is: right what we need to do in terms of knowledge management, knowledge sharing. What do we need to feed back into the staff that we were so sure that it was the right way to go about things and iterate. And I don't think that we ever build enough time to do that. A lot of that, in terms of how we speak to other practitioners and the wider community is just very ad hoc and is really informal. [...] I don't even think we share the good stories, which is where I’d like to start at least. I would love for us to be really open and really honest, but we have to go at the pace that we can go in that respect, it’s hard to force it
- Slow learning/reading debate vs sharing learning
- I'm reading a book right now and I've created a huge slide deck so as I'm going through the book I'm pulling out key concepts for people and then each of those things gets a slide, And the way I see it is like a slow learning opportunity, where you might get together with people for a week, one day a week, and then for each day, the slide deck you introduce the concept to the people, they go away, they come back, you talk you learn something . So I really like that idea especially now, to get into some idea that are quite layered and quite rich
Social media, emails
- Usually I share at work, or twitter, I share on this, and things like that, i'm very much a twitter person
- I'll respond on slack, email, forums. I suppose as well, because I'm part of a working group [...] where I share a lot of knowledge as well, I share editorial roles and that allows me to give back some of the knowledge that I have and put it back into the world
- it's been twitter and blogs, and I will send an email to folks saying this is worth watching, pay attention to, ..., ‘I like that paper”, or “that person is on the right track here” or even organisation, [...] it's highlighting these in other terms, it's showing these good practices, it's follow these people , there are doing it the right way, [...] slow built, community led, not following the system, following their own thing, that's kind of the way I'm trying to do this, it's amplifying and showcase that. [...] it's about finding folks doing the good things and showcase and amplify that and then do your own thing and then iterate
Value of sharing our work, processes, & learning
- I’ve met people around the world that have done like a project [inspired by us], and we are like that’s bonkers. But they’ve looked at our approach because we opened it up
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