What the SAtSD means to practitioners
Visual summary of the interactions
SAtSD’s Scottish identity is interpreted in a variety of ways, with both positive and negative connotations
Access the part of the Miro Board represented in the image
List of clusters of insights
Select one of the clusters of insights to see the quotes supporting it. Select it again to hide the quotes.
Why specifically Scottish?
- Why is there the SAtSD? Why isn’t it just service design? It needs to be sold to me that there should be a special Scottish way
- Colleagues in [...] different places talk about the approach of Scottish design. It's just about service design
- I quite often hear ‘well, why is it Scottish approach, why is it different to service design?’
- Does Scotland want to be different? Are they setting themselves out to be different? And then failing at being different
A brand, a product
- It's an approach that has been packaged up along with resources and assets to codify and standardise practice, so to me it's a product and a brand [...] it feels like it's a brand that's been promoted
Scotland: SD school & army
- It gives the impression that design is over here, and that we are building an army of designers to be the biggest design school in the world. So for that reason again, it feels like it's a brand that's been promoted
- We have this ambition about Scotland being almost like a design school and, you know, people being equipped with the skills to understand what is expected of them and how they can participate
A vision or a promise of meaningful involvement
- Service design is everybody’s business. [...] we sometimes present SD as if it is just for the cool kids. It is not, it is for everybody, it is for every citizen. You know, that right to co-design or at least to influence, to have a say on the services that you as a citizen receive; that right to help determine how those work, that's what it means to me
- It's almost like a kind of promise I suppose, from Scottish Government about taking a citizen-led approach about how they design their services. So kind of like putting a stake in the ground and saying: "that's how we want to work, this is the approach that we would like to take and this is our promise to put the citizens at the centre of how we do public services"
- An idea and a principle which encourages people to ensure that they are not designing in their own heads, that they are taking that design out of their own heads and that they are pushing away from them. For me the big part of it is "where is the power in any design activity?" if the power is with you as a designer, as a researcher, as a content or service designer, then it's in the wrong place. Now that's not to say that specialist skills should not be there but we should try to push the power out to the actual service users and giving and encouraging them ways to engage with us more effectively
- wWat I take from SAtSD, that's the hope for me, that it will become more ingrained across national and local government and 3rd sector. [...] for me it's going to be core competence: if your organisation is not doing this then you are missing out. and it's been quite proven that organisations if they do this, they get better
- The Scottish approach is very much around trying to actively encourage us to get people into the room as much as possible, it's very easy to kind of forget, to do the primary research with some people, [...] but then when we get to the design process, they're out, we're the specialists, we know what we are doing, we're going to come up with this and there you go! it's forgotten. And I think that's where we're slightly different, I'm not saying we're unique, there are places around the world that do that stuff, and do it well, but trying to make that a key part of the design, that's probably a bit more unique
- What SAtSD means to me and why it is different to Service Design practice is that it is about inclusion and about being inclusive in its approach and how services are design and the process. So it is not just designing a service in a person-centred test, in a way, it’s about making sure that people can be involved inclusively in the design and delivery
People are talking about it
- I have talked to [people] in Wales who are doing a bit of this work.
- I think it's landed well and when I speak to colleagues in London, and Manchester and different places they will talk about the approach of Scottish Design [...] They've heard about it potentially at conferences like SDinGov, some other work like Snook and some big authorities, [...] but also through the Scottish Government's own website and I know it's easy to access
Setting expectations
- People from other countries look at it and they are like what‘s Scotland is doing is different. But it‘s not. And then, it kind of draws weird glances to be like: "does Scotland want to be different? Are they setting themselves out to be different? And then failing at being different. It sets weird expectations, I think
An opportunity
- Taking a more assets based approach to the work that is being done, not just always approach people as always needing something that only our service can provide. Building on [what people are already doing] or identifying things that could be further developed or linked to other things or approaching people with the knowledge and the assumption that they already have a whole life and if that whole life doesn't include something that a service thinks it should then having a look at that approach and maybe flipping that a bit
- And I think if any angle was desired to set out Scotland as different or as more forward leading, then I would want it to be that aspect of involving people in designing the design work. I‘m almost interested in saying “hey, we‘re the designers within the public sector in Scotland, and we don’t want to lead on the design work. We want to take it back. We want to help other people design their services and maybe that‘s what sets us apart
Leap in involvement and services
- SAtSD is one of these core things that has this opportunity to really do a huge leap in different services and to have people more involved and take responsibilities, and maybe even design these services themselves, that would be the holy grail if you like
Service design for local government
- The opportunity with the SAtSD is that we can get almost a more council and local view on how that could be applied. Because you cannot just lift from a text book or from a course and say let’s go and use this. It doesn’t quite work. You need a version for local government because we‘re so different in that aspect. [...] Having that national view on Scottish local government
About the particularities Scottish Context
- There is an appetite to do things differently. There may not be an understanding across the board. But there is an absolute appetite to do things. And the SAtSD, you know, people are talking about it. That kind of provides me with the evidence that people want things to change. I can see the great ideas in there, and now I want to know how we do this, cause it’s actually really hard
- It links so neatly to the Scottish approach to government, which is very much around the kind of community empowerment and the idea of with not for really really meaning that
- To me it’s about the context we’ve got in Scotland, and it’s about how we apply it to the challenges we’ve got to delivering good public services in Scotland. And there are some core ideas there that are significantly, probably different to how other people may approach service design
- To be able to speak to someone and say 'we have a user journey that covers all this' and 'this is how we operate'. [...] when you start describing that through the lens of users and these life events or these problem-cascades once you have described that to people, they are just nodding, going ‘yes, we totally get it, we are part of that’. And it has to live somewhere, but people need to be able to say ‘no, but this is something that we subscribe to and want to get properly in Scotland’. And to me that’s about the Scottish context
- It is not a fake construct to me at all. I think that some people may be a bit cynical about it
- Building digital stuff, thinking about agile, and looking at what government digital services were doing, and thinking: we need have to be able to do a digital transformation at the Scottish government and the Scottish public sector, but we need to do figure out how to do it in Scotland, because the context is very very different
Scotland's size
- The size of Scotland plays a factor in that and it's more to do with the size of the public sector, and the private sector and the relationship that that allows, because it's much easier to connect things together [...] if I'm working in one policy area, the other policy area is just sitting over there, I can talk to them, they are not a separate department, there are not in a separate town, ok, this should not be an issue in terms of remote working but it's an issue because there are kind of "out of sight out of mind" [...] I think size is a big factor
Alignment with policy context
- The different policy context that Scotland operates in. And I think that is more about inclusion, it’s more about bringing the right people to the table, taking time to make decisions... you know, my joke about Scotland is that England will have done it yesterday, Scotland will decide tomorrow. I mean that really positively about Scotland, in a policy context I think we really are about inclusive and genuine interest in putting people’s needs at the centre. I think that’s what makes it different and that’s what it is. It’s about aligning... I call it the cognitive operating system of a country. A country tends to sort of unite itself around what the government’s policies are. I think it’s aligned with that kind of cognitive system
- My interest was picked and it felt we should have a national approach. It's about this consistency. [...] In Scotland at least, we've got progressive policy. It's leaning towards a wellbeing economy. We will never have a better opportunity to make that real. And I think that's encouraging, there are good example of this happening, just grassroots, there is lots of good noises and we will see what good actions come from that
Struggling with its political connotations
- Because it‘s Scottish Government and because of who runs the SG, they do kind of need to say something like “oh, we got that special Scottish way of doing things”, which is not something that I‘m into. I find it very difficult to engage with something with that kind of apparent political lens to it
Cultural change
- It's a cultural change thing [...] you are just creating a new context for it, and maybe that’s what needs to happen within Scotland just because of the desire to do everything slightly separately. I understand that
Nothing new for practitioners
- It's nothing new, someone just put a label on it. [...] I suppose that people have been doing what we are doing for years and years, so it's nothing new; and I think we need to remember that. But I think that the terminology has changed and the way that people, and those roles sit within organisations have changed
- I read it and i have to say that, yes of course, it seems so basic and yes, I don’t disagree with any of it, but of course you are doing that. That is just the bare minimum
- It's just a retelling of things that are already exist in my opinion. [...] As a practitioner, there is nothing new in the SAtSD. [...] It is a very positive thing, [but] not critically advancing the discipline
- To me, it’s actually a lot less about the practices. The practitioners know what they do, they know what design is, they know the design process
- But for like as a practitioner myself and like my workload, it doesn’t really, I would say I’m not really bothered about it because I am practitioner and we are experts on our own and we know what we’re doing day to day. [...] The couple of pages, which is like the actual document, as a practitioner I don’t find them extremely helpful because it doesn’t say anything
- Beyond using it for sending it to executives and as a resource, I‘m a bit confused to how else to use it and maybe that‘s the point of it. Maybe that‘s fine
Other: