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Clusters of insights - quick access

• Relationship between the public and the third sector - an abysss between them
• Identified lacks in projects, teams or organisations
• Constraints to work with
• Barrier: low maturity of service design
• Barrier: how we talk and present service design
• Gaps in how we procure service design
• Gaps in applying service design approaches

Relationship between the public and the third sector - an abysss between them

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Third sector filling gaps but underfunded

• The difference between the public and third sectors, at the moment, they're miles apart. The inequality there, is massive. I've had an absolute baptism of fire working in a third sector organisation. I am constantly told by the stakeholders that: (a) there is massive inequality in funding; (b) the third sector picks up on the gaps that the public sector do not address; and (c) they are doing it on pittance [and] in highly stressful situations. [In my area of work], all the specialist support that exists in this space are third sector run, except for maybe one city council service that is associated with social work. But they are consistently underfunded and they are dealing with a massive case overload
• For the 3rd sector it can be quite difficult especially for things like funding and things like that? to get the right skills in, and to keep them in

Filters and layers between people and the government

• So there is something about how we could do better I guess as public and private to get a little bit closer to a more diverse group of people in our communities without going in inappropriate places in the relationships, there is room there for something that is not the current way that is a small handful of groups of people that are organise
• I guess it's a typical way organisations (public and private) interact with third sector representative organisations. And that's hugely problematic and especially on occasions when those 3rd sector organisations are funded by the government. So we've got this really weird twisted ecosystem going on, that means there are sort of filters and layers between institutions and people in communities now on one level, that's right and that's the way it should be, there should be something between governments and people, but I think it could look a bit different than it looks now, because I could script, if you were to say to me you're sitting in a public service and you need to speak disabled people, LGBT people, black people, I could tell you exactly what 3rd sector would be approached, and I think that's not right

Public and third sector not supporting each other

• So all these things come into play. How even you start to put service design in that, when you got two massive sectors that don’t effectively support each other. And you know, the third sector has a lot to learn from the public sector, but also public sector needs to open their eyes and understand that third sector are picking up on [public sector gaps]. So yeah, there’s huge issues there even before you get to that point
• [third sector organisations] are consistently pushed back from public sector organisations, say why we need to support this person. There’s a massive issue with evidence

Other insights:

• Inequality between the third sector and the public sector
• pushing service design into a broken system

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Identified lacks in projects, teams or organisations

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Lack of resources

Not enough designers

Too few designers hired by pubic sector organisations

• Having more of us [...] Service designers I mean there Only tends to be 1 or 2 in each place
• There are so many stakeholders, so many different interest and not enough resources to do it properly to be honest. And I would rather do a little bit more tactical first

Small budget for design

Design is expensive

• Time, resources, yeah, there are, definitely. For us it would not be acceptable to allow some of those barriers... not to break down those barriers, but I think it does make it difficult. People who come to us sometimes wanting to retrospectively think about engagement and consulting users. They never have enough time, never have the skills profile, do not always necessarily have the budget...
• It’s really expensive. Even with our own external team, you have to put a lot of effort and energy into it, and one of the biggest things is that it takes people from delivering the job that they got a pedal the horse on, or pedal the hamster rather. I think there’s a hamster wheel of delivering the existing model, and that’s tough because you have gotta be financially fluid. As an organisation you need to keep making money, or you gotta keep delivering your outcomes that you might have to report to local authorities, press, government. So if you take your eye of that model, that original model that you are trying to redesign, yeah, it’s difficult. It costs you money and resource

Cost associated with learning new skills

• The perceived time and cost of learning a new skill for some group that would be people who might be up-skilling or they would need up-skill if they want to deploy service design so I think there is a cost in time and actual money

Lack of coordination

Lack of collaboration

Many different department doing the same thing but not talking to each other

• [a] colleague is currently working on a project with a small team [in the organisation]. [...] What they had quickly discovered is that this is not the only department in [the organisation] that is doing that [specific theme of the project]. There are probably thousands of different things going on around that specific issue. And of course, they‘re all not really talking to each other. They all create their own content. It‘s all completed disjointed. And this is just one example. So, multiply this by thousands of things [the organisation] needs to do

Different SD groups not talking to each other

• I have a lot of Slack channels, all in slightly different areas, different enough like User-centred Scotland, Service Design Scotland. What is the difference? I mean the conversations in these spaces have different tones but why are those people not talking to each other?

Working siloed from the rest of the organisation

• The biggest barrier is silos, really. I mean I have thought I‘ve worked in large organisations in the past but [this organisation] is just extreme, [...] it‘s like a franchise. You‘ve got your [service area] and the [organisation's] logo is above the door. You‘re part of the [organisation] but people really feel they are not. And that is partly just because of the size of the institution. It‘s massive. It‘s huge

Lack of coordination

Having the right resources but don‘t know how to bring them together

• They have really quickly developed this culture of let‘s just get out lots and lots of websites because this is what we like to do. [...] how we actually do this full... you know there is a great opportunity here of user experience work that could be done at high quality, user research plus content design, graphic design plus interface design plus web developers. We kind of got all the pieces of the puzzle there but they are not fitting together. And that‘s a great frustration to me because each of those teams have their own kind of agenda and that’s what is lacking

Too many people in the way

• And actually, sometimes I think we have too many people in the way. It‘s like too many cooks, too many different opinions and no alignment in them

Lack of design leadership

Skill to Commission leadership is missing

• So yeah, I think this is a skill, commissioning intelligently of leadership. Not leadership as directive, but as a leader: ‘I'm going to buy this thing and I'm going to open up to people, they can help me shape it’. So that's a skill that's missing

No designers in leadership roles

• But because there is no one there, like above us, able to steer the decision making. It just becomes a little bit like a bonfire. The coordination is what is lacking in a lot of these projects

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Constraints to work with

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Legacies

technology taken up possibilities and setting limitations for SD

• Legacies in technology and the technology systems that are in place. I do think that they can over-define the service delivery model which leads to a lack of... It’s like an imagination gap of what could be possible and what is physically be possible. You know, they take away that possibility because the technology system is set up to deliver services in such a kind of dominant way. It is the model that is always being considered

Rigidity of tendering frameworks

• Last year I had a beautiful experience with a third sector organisation, who asked me to come in to embed user research functionality in their team and that was a discussion and a negotiation [...] I could never have done that if I was replying to something on a framework somewhere. I think this doesn't happen enough. The way people answer to tenders could be done in a different way to start to introduce ‘this is how I work’, this is how we work. Because people need turn around, especially with agencies, there is probably not enough space to take that risk, but that's the other it could happen is the way to respond: "the way you're proposing doesn't feel good to us, because it doesn't include you in the process" or something on the citizen side doesn't feel good, but that can be really risky with rigid frameworks

Remote service design

Digital is not inclusive

• There is a lot of talk about inclusivity, but in practice... I'm really curious about who is leading that front, and a few of the groups I mentioned are doing that. In other words, what's community engagement in the 21st century? how do they do it, whether it's online or offline? Many people are not online yet, and we need to be mindful of that audience. A lot of what is done is to support them, and yet they are never in the conversation. So it's very much a kind of online/offline thing, so the pechakucha, booklet and various things, it's very much thinking of, and never mind the digital first at the same time, you need to have that physical medium for folks, if not at least a place to go. That's another thing: we are losing places where people can go and get it, it's a big struggle we've got in my time. so yeah, that's another challenge

How to work remotely?

• Yesterday afternoon, when we were doing this workshop with the leaders of this local authority, and one of the questions was: “yes, great service design is everybody’s business, yeah, we go along with that. How do you do that remotely?”
• I think Zoom is fantastic. But then you get to a client says: ‘no, can't use Zoom , have to use Teams. Now, Teams is the Devil's interface, but you got to make it work. Yesterday afternoon, we were on Teams, and it was... the last couple of weeks, I've been tearing my head around. You know, I can't do breakout rooms, how do we do it? It went fine, it was great. And you have to figure out that... I end up buying books like this [book on teams], you know which [laughter] So you have to, all the time you're learning what works what doesn't work you figure out how Mural works, and then the client says: you know, they just Got up to speed with Teams, you can't introduce anything else that is more complicated than that. Ok... so let’s find a middle ground, something that is easier. We did a Padlet yesterday, that worked fine. So you know, so we're kind of doing one step at a time. In a few weeks, they'll be using Mural like pros, but not quite at the moment

Difficult getting people involved

Two quotes:

• But getting all the stakeholders involved is going to be challenging
• Other barriers come from working in the third sector and with people

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Barrier: low maturity of service design

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Relationship to User Research

Understanding SD role within a multidisciplinary team

• When I found that there is other things that I am probably missing because I am focusing so much in that research, I am just traditionally focused on that research in the first part, but I should be focusing more on... bring the cycle more closer, because that’s also being covered by a product manager... so you see it is falling between these cracks a little bit. The positive is that I feel very capable of working with people and working across teams, but it feels that sometimes my role slips through the team’s different cracks and it is hard to understand what I should be doing or what the expectations of me are

SD and UR having similar skillset

• From university, I am more interested in the research, I am very interested in the questions, that’s a lot of curiosity. And design work has to come and will come. But sometimes it’s just, you need to do your analysis, you need to understand the problem and then there’s a natural point of coming together. And I feel sometimes slightly out of control with that, because I can’t rush analysis so I can’t... and somebody else is holding me to account or something. So I think it’s really hard one. I’d say lots of UR are SD and lots of SD are UR. They are just in different titles. In reality it’s very similar skillsets

Working close together with UR

• Where I potentially have issues with is understanding role of service designer within the government context space. So moving from a space where service design was end-to-end, into as space where you are kind of doing half of it, or only responsible for half of it. In a discovery project, kind of be learning what should I be doing at this point, if you are doing all the recruitment, you are doing all the discussion-guide, you are doing all those elements, what am I meant to be doing? A lot of the time, I just try and build as strong rapport with the user researcher as possible, and ensure that we are aligned in terms of practice and that they are aware that I am comfortable with them taking the lead and that this is their project as well

SD and UR title being artificial labels

• We label specific parts of the profession - like service designer and user researcher. I find that a major gap and barrier because for me, I sit it somewhere in the middle. [...] There is so much that can be done if you intertwine those kinds of two professions
• Sometimes I’m not entirely sure what kind of service design I‘m doing. So, I feel like we are more in the user research sphere

SD being stuck in research

• I hate for research and insights to basically just be stuck into this report writing, that phase of writing reports and then not getting anywhere
• I am always expected to do discovery work and then hand over. But I am a service designer, I am not a user researcher. So I design things and, ideally, I also oversee some of the delivery, and then again, learn from it. If not, I don’t develop. The engineers have that option. They build, they implement, they learn, the build, they implement. But I am stuck at the discovery phase. So it’s something that service design has become known for and it’s great, but now we’re overdoing it. I’m just like running around, doing user research, and then handing over to engineers who build. And it’s not like-- people understand the double diamond in a way where one discipline is responsible for one part. So service design is the discovery, User Interface design is the prototyping, and then the engineers build, and then product management does delivery. And that is absolutely nowhere close to how this was ever meant to work. It’s very difficult to do. I think we need to do more design work and more implementing it, and even patterns, cause I am not doing anything else

Gaps in the understanding of implementating service design

Focus on digital service design

Digital is not always the solution

• People really focusing on that digital will change the way people do things it needs to maybe be presented as a conversation rather than a definitive set of tools. So, I think that causes a bit of a barrier sometimes. [...] Another thing is the major focus on digital within service design. I find that a major barrier and a gap because that's not my background. And I find often that digital is not always the solution, and that often it is around ways of working and culture, so I think that really holds us back including in our community and how we talk about things. [...] My skill set brings a different kind of positives, I need some more about team mentality and not just focus on digital

People being employed based on digital experience rather than skillset

• Scottish government, where all the employed service designers are asked to put on digital transformation or social security, but we do not all fit in those boxes and we should be employed based on our skillset and what is actually needed

Understanding of discipline and value is missing

Lack of understanding of what user experience is

• [some colleagues don't ] understand what user experience is and don’t see the value in it. [They only  see  coding as meaningful work]]

What SD do when they come into teams

• there is still a gap in the understanding of what service designers do when they go into teams. I think that’s really challenging cause service design can be quite intangible in terms of what it looks like. It is so dependent on the team profile, the willingness to work in a different way, all of those constrains we talked about already. So I think it’s quite difficult for both service designers to know what to do in those circumstances - because someone isn’t just saying ‘here you go, go for it’ - and it’s really difficult for people who are commissioning the work or actually needing to understand what to ask of a service designer or what space to create for them. [...] certainly what I see is the practices quite often come in from different environments and they come into a very immature environment to work in. And that can be a very real crash, very very difficult because that’s immediately you start to get this ‘why wouldn’t you let me do my job’... people, don’t know what you do

Not understanding the value of service design research

• [Our colleagues in public sector] are used to doing research, [...] they call it requirements' gathering. And so it’s similar to what we do but actually sufficiently different for it to not quite work in a design process - Because it is essentially just asking People ‘ hey, what do you want?’, [...] They look at the data, and some of them have a practice around Interviewing as well. So they don't always understand the difference [with service design research]. [...] like a doctor going to interview some other consultant doctor friend, and then come back and say, ‘ This Is How We Do It’, and they actually call it requirements’ gathering. And so it’s similar to what we do but actually sufficiently different for it to not quite work in a design process - Because it is essentially just asking People ‘ hey, what do you want?’, And then coming back and say ‘ that's what they want’, And only speaking to like a senior senior consultant and Even asking those people not about their own experience but asking The senior consultant, ‘ so what is the best way for a patient to book an appointment with you?’ what would be the ideal state?’ And then hearing the response and then telling us ‘do this’

SD not respected as other fields

• If an engineer says ‘ I think the platform should be built this way’, Then usually someone will go ‘Omg, you are an engineer, I could never have an opinion on your great expertise that is so specific and professional. So just tell me what to do so I can enable you to do this work’. And this does not happen to me. I always wonder, you know, what is the actual thing that makes it happen for them and not for me. And I go through cycles of just thinking that it is the way we are set up, the way design language can sound arrogant to people, whereas engineering is a specialist skill somehow in people’s minds... so I think there is various issues, there is also gender and things like that, and there’s strength in numbers cause there’s 30 of them. But I think that is really interesting, and I think if we have to re-professionalise ourselves somehow and take inspiration from some of this other people that are managing to build and implement in these organisations, and are really respected for it

Lack of awareness of service design

Don't understand the process

• When you are creating knowledge services or professional services, quite often you are working with legal or professional writers who will want to just crack on with the writing process. They will want to start going: "ok, I know this project is about child care, it's social work, so I'm going to write all I know about [this service area]". So I'll say, "we're not at that stage of the project yet, we need to discover what the needs of this project are, what people need. I don't need you to tell me all you know about [this topic], I want everyone to get what they need. I don't need to know all about [the topic], because they can just google that themselves. They have a specific need and we have not found this yet, so can you not write anything for a few weeks?" That's a different type of job role

Only incremental innovation

• Also there is a lot of talk about innovation but not really seeing it, there is incremental shift but not really a leap, they’re not totally different ways of doing things

Not enough awareness from senior stakeholders

• I think as a gap we don't have enough very senior people who have a good understanding of what service design is. Senior civil servant, CEOs, decision makers. It's not necessarily across the board but that lack of understanding might lead to decision which pre-limit your ability to design a decent service
• I think there is still a lack of appreciation or awareness of exactly what it is and what it can do. because if you think of the public sector, I suppose there are 2 sides to it: we are going to write policy, and the other side is the delivery of that policy. Now in terms of delivering the policy, we are not bad, the agencies are now looking for service designers, there is service design within digital, with SS, with Scottish Enterprise, there is a reasonable awareness of that, but not at a senior enough level, and that's maybe another problem

Being stuck, not pushing until the end

Not enough SD at policy level

• We're still a bit light in terms of, we don't design our policy still, so we are not thinking in terms of SD, or design ways when we are at that policy level.Which means we end up with policies that are completely un-implementable, they don't necessarily allow for making clear what service could be? they kind of are putting too much into a box, it's already been designed

Bringing SD in too late

• it's like being told: "you fix this problem" when it should be "we fix this problem". And we do that by saying, "ok, so how was this project given birth in the first place? who has actioned this?" Let's go back to them - what does the organisation want? What's the [project] strategy? - and then, before you can even get to the fact that it has some money and this person likes this tool, we need to answer all these things before we have this workshop. That's a blocker, I'd say that's a blocker

Stuck Organisations that don't push best practice

• There are other tools right now like MegaMentor, they are trying to figure out their stuff and I‘ve done a bit of mentoring through them. I think that fills that gap but still I don’t have the day to day experience. It‘s just a chat. That‘s the main thing for me right now because it really makes you think do you want to stand this job, or do you want to develop?
• My big bugbear with these stuck organisations, [...] they don't really push the best practice, or at least this type of thinking. I say that because years ago with participatory budget (PB), [the] officer leading knew nothing. They were not sure they could trust the community with money. You think there is somebody there who don't quite understand PB at all and yet best practice has been here for 8 months, 2 years and you think, wow! that ignorance is detrimental to you own organisation and never mind the people you serve

Wrong expectations to SD

Expectations: a good facilitator can solve any problem

• It's thought that by you being there and being a good facilitator you can solve this problem, but it's a big impossible object to move

Negative responses to hearing the truth from people

• I'm thinking about places where I've been the first service design team, first user research project, and I think people think they know until this actually happens and this is especially true in user research, you'll know this, when you start hearing the truth from people or something you didn't expect, it can be really jarring and unwelcome. So if teams have had an experience like that of service design, they might be apprehensive to continue or to do it again

Needing a wow factor

• if something doesn’t have that kind of glamorous wow factor that it’s something different, then it’s just feels like words in a corporate strategy. So I think that can be a barrier from an agency perspective and can be a barrier if you don’t have something coming in that is a little bit different

Think it can be done in a short space of time

• One of them I think is service design as a whole, sometimes it's seen as a silver bullet, we'll talk to users and poof! something magical will happen and we will do that in 2 weeks! and this will solve all the world problems, there is a time and place for like jams and like a few days where you do an intense bit of work for something specific but sometime that's misunderstood for something like: oh design can be done a week or like a ridiculous amount of time, a bit like hackathon where people assume people can develop in 24hours, you know ... it depends what it is you are trying to tackle

organisations just wanting the thing

• So that's one thing that is a kind of barrier, when it doesn't necessarily have this impact in a short space of time, or if you do manage to have this kind of impact, then it has become what they've learn, you can do magical things in a couple of weeks which is also a bit dangerous
• If I think about people who are commissioning like the places I go into, generally there is a misunderstanding about what user research is and what service design is, and then how the two are linked. So I think that there is a lot of excitement about service design, and I wonder if sometimes that means it's been hastily brought into certain places. That general awareness of what the thing is and what it will bring to you. A lot of places recently that I've been working 'inside of' or 'with' really do not understand their role and the process either through being exposed as an observer to research a design or being a research participant themselves. It's almost like we are bringing service designers and user researchers to do the thing over there with these people, and they are like: "we don't have anything to do with this, just bring me the thing once it's done", that's all they want "we just want the thing" that's something as well, so I would call that: a skill. [..] it does have a lot to do with how service design is brought in a project or a team, an organisation
• Last year I had a beautiful experience with a third sector organisation, who asked me to come in to embed user research functionality in their team and that was a discussion and a negotiation because it was necessary for them to be totally part of this. It wasn't going to be done to them, it needed to come and experience. And there was a user-research on the back of this as well, so as we were setting up UR, we brought them along through every step, they were shadowing and were embedded, and that had to be discussed because the assumption was that they didn't need to participate in this. I could never have done that if I was replying to something on a framework somewhere. I think this doesn't happen enough

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Barrier: how we talk and present service design

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The language we’re using

Jargon being a blocker

• We’re terrible for jargon. That is our worst problem. I sometimes get into that. No, actually ‘remember your roots’. Content design is about being as clear and accessible as possible, and taking out that jargon. So we are wiggling our finger at policy saying ‘you are talking a different language’. We talk in a different language when we talk to people when we are doing it professionally. Really bad. We need to keep checking on it

Difficult SD language

• Always write stuff for the Intelligent person on the bus, right? Always write things that someone who is bright, as everybody is, but doesn’t have specialist knowledge. If they can understand it, then it's fine. But if they can’t understand it, then you have to think again how you are explaining things. So language is vitally important
• [As a former academic], I sometimes find [using plain English] difficult, and I make mistakes. But then, you try to figure out what was a better way of communicating
• Language is one of the biggest barriers to involving people, and we need to be more conscious, self-conscious of the language we use
• [working with people] you have to be very self critical of the language that you use; so you're not using jargon and cool kids language. You are using language that is plain English

Academic side of service design

• The theory and the academic side of service design can sometimes jar a little bit against local government and central government and how they do things and the culture of it

Jargon ruins relationship

• They lack the sort of people's skills. [...] onboarding other people who are not designers, sometimes they will talk in a way that is too robotic or too jargon-based to other people in the business, and that can be a blocker. I think I'm better at it. It's just knowing the team and the audience. But if they were to speak to [another] service designer they hadn't met face-to-face, they haven't had the relationship build up and they automatically say, "we are going to do some customer journey mapping, or service blueprinting", and that colleague didn't know what that was, if they have the relationship with me I can say ok, so that's what this is and I'll explain it a little bit better, and we'll just get on with it. So I think if this relationship falls down, they will forget that this person they are speaking to might not know this tool or that method or the reason for doing something and that can be an issue

SD want to be special

Trying to be different

• I feel like a lot of people get caught up on like saying how it is different to other things rather than using that energy to make something and show what it is. I feel like that often holds people back and people get stuck saying “but I have a business analyst, I have a user researcher, why do I need a service designer?”

Designers pushing too hard

• So other managers, who have different agendas, how do I sell what we are trying to do for them? It‘s been quite difficult [...]. I think [another manager] maybe pushed a little bit too hard and turned people off in the way they tried to sell it. I‘m going to try to take a more softy approach. But that is also going to take more time and that also means that we‘re going to lose some battles

Impostor syndrome

• Being a board member, I had mega impostor syndrom about joining, cause I genuinely was looking around the room going like ‘what do I actually know’, and I forget that I actually have done a lot of stuff and know a different way of seeing the world. But I was actually looking around the room and going ‘aahhh’, They have got like a degree in law, and there’s like a lord of something, and then this person is like an absolute expert.. And I am going, ‘so, yeah, we could probably like map like how people [use the service]’ but nobody has thought that way. [...] I try to remind myself that I come with a perspective of seeing the world [unlike the] others

SD loves to describe itself

• Service design has long been a discipline that loves to describe itself

Job titles

SD beyond SD title

• As a product designer, the breadth of the work that I do involves a lot of service design

Finding the right job title

• I think job titles are awful, I think some of the best people doing the service design and designing services were not trained as designers and were not necessarily given that title and it's taken them a long time to get that title. Job titles are a massive blocker
• sometime we can get tied up in trying to define things of who is a designer who is not a service designer, have you been trained, are you a good one or a bad one, tell me your approach, Sometimes we can be a bit tied up in you know: what is that, how do you define yourself? if your title is not service designer, does that matter?
• Any kind of person, that is doing any kind of work that is human-centred is of value. So, what I want to do is get my team in a position of being advocates for those. Whatever you do, just think of it in a human-centred way. That’s kind of what are starting to talk about. But we have not figured out how to make this a nice job title. So, I‘m still being called the user experience manager
• Job titles is a massive barrier especially in the 3rd sector, people are called things like learning officer for example, so people would not go to them because of this title, but they are in fact doing service design

Intangible design work is difficult to show

• [...] Although my title is Product Designer, I meet weekly with a team of user researchers and services designers. We have a community of practice around service design, so that really keeps me involved in service design projects. The title is one thing, and yes I do a lot of digital design, and design of applications, but I'm heavily involved in service design
• Workshops [...] with different partners or user journey or service blueprint, work I've done that's not tangible. It's not something that I can go and say "look at that pretty bit of portfolio"

Inconsistency and confusion about SD

All or nothing attitude

• And also, if you are a person, who is kind of interested in it but aren’t sure if it’s the right route for you, it feels like it‘s all or nothing. You have to become a service designer rather than just do a little bit of it. It doesn’t feel like we‘re allowing people to try it out

Different connotations of design

• Because I think design has specific connotations that make people think certain things. And I want to try to include people more. They are all heavily loaded with different connotations. And for me the focus on the human-centred aspect of what we‘re trying to do is more valuable. Because that way we can go beyond not only the designers but also people doing things like lean and change management, business analysis
• We know what our practice should be doing, from a practice perspective, we have a really inconsistent view of user-centred design in the delivery of services, or in the public sector, or in government context, or in policy... really inconsistent. I think there’s some basics that we need to get right there. So I think it’s more the holistic picture that there’s a gap. I don’t... I think it’s easy to fix, by such bright and willing and intelligent people, but I think that we need to admit that that’s still a gap that we need to address

Inconsistency in UCD approach

• I think all these user-centred design practices are greater than the sum of their parts; and I think there is also a gap in understanding how to interact and how people need to work together. A lot of it is very personality-based rather than... we all have whether it is a service designer, a user researcher, interaction designer, content designer, graphic designer, or any other kind of, you know, product owner, delivery... don’t have a consistent story of what user-centred design approaches are

It‘s not about the tools

• It's not that helpful, because how can you make different tools, different playbook or whatever, when really it's not so much about the tools, it's more about how you apply things to the problem, whatever that is within it the constraints as well, so if you have a certain amount of time, you get to something done, then you do the best that you can in that time, it may not be the best thing in the world, but you know. You need to apply things depending on what it is that's going on

Confusion about what service design is

• I saw a really good blog post from someone, I think from Edinburgh uni, and he was talking about maybe the confusion a bit around service design. What it‘s actually is. He was using this metaphor of someone lying on the beach and there is an area photo of him that‘s quite up-close, like an UX within the service design industry, who would maybe look at how is your experience going to the beach and the interaction you have and just looking at that. But as you zoom out of the picture it becomes more and more high-level, a planetary picture of that person lying on the beach within the ecosystem. It’s that kind scale of operation. If you are operating on a much higher level, then not dismissing what another person is doing at the beach level. Like trying to improve the beach why the other person it’s trying to do whatever, and to take into account what’s realistic possible
• Different definitions of that as well within companies, a service designer might be super technical and maybe be more towards UX in one company and in another company it's something completely different, so communicating that is a bit tricky. I think service design is quite hard to define, it's a bit of a mix-match between design, psychology, marketing, UX, and technical stuff and people do various levels of all of it. And it's a difficult thing to properly communicate. So don't get hang up on that
• What's the difference between design research and service design and UX design. I don't really think it actually matters, it's just about figuring out what people skills set is and working with that. I think it's a bit of a barrier as well

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Gaps in how we procure service design

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Procurement of service design

We‘re procuring items of design

• I feel like we‘re still in a world, where we are procuring items of design especially design company that are brought in into other companies still have that list to fulfil even if the project steers away from that. So, I think we‘ve got work to do in that area

Procurement focusing on short term goals

• In terms of public sector procure service design as well, the procurement process doesn't always help the service design approach, and the way it doesn't, how it's done, doesn't help the long term goals either, you know they sometime do a chunk of work in discovery but then a different company does something else and at each stage, it's like a whole process, which is not the best way of doing it

Procurement focusing on functional requirements, we don't look at the quality of the service

• I think the other challenge that we've got is: we procure badly, it's very different, I mean it's not a criticism of the procurement approach that are taken, it's more a criticism about how we have to procure at the moment, and we have not necessarily addressed something like service qualities [as opposed to a functional requirement ...  accessibility for example is a service quality] it's a quality attribute, we don't really deal with things like that very well

How we hire service designers

Not enough people doing SD

• [Our organisation] has very few service designers. You rely on that core team. If I was to leave, or if someone was to be suddenly unavailable, then the rest of the team who have a basic grasp of the tools and methods and managing processes would probably suffer without having a permanent designer in place. Someone who keeps an overview. You can easily slip back into doing things in the old way
• Bodies on the ground is quite a problem

Standardised job descriptions

• I think it‘s about selling it a bit more about what the benefits are and advertising it in a different way. Again, we‘re quite set with these advertisements. We have standardised job descriptions and roles and responsibilities and job adverts. So, it kind of takes a lot of the fun and interesting bits compared to a service designer for a creative agency. The way they sell it or recruit be entirely different to the way we do by stripping out all the interesting bits and making it sound quite boring

Getting a pot of money to fix a problem

• Initially, they would go: "but the contract says..". It could be a founded project, or a project that was born internally, or our own advisors might have said "we have a need for something". But more often than not it would be a project funded by Government or from a private agency or something, they gave me a pot of money to fix a problem. So it tends to come with a set amount of money and a hard goal post, "by [this date], we want this up and running. We don't know what it is you're going to make but we know when we give you a timeline". Pushing back has gotten easier, but it has taken a long time, perhaps almost 3 years to realise that we are not just a production house, we are problem solvers. We don't necessarily know what the solution is, never mind what the problem is yet, so hard deadline is good and the pot of money is great because we can't live without the pot of money. We need to be a bit more flexible with the process and I think creating the process based around design thinking has allowed stakeholders to realise that "Ok, research is important, a content design approach is important to the language that we us"'. We no longer just set things on the shelf, we no longer go "ok, the next funded project came long so let's forget about that one". We need to maintain and evaluate, and to make sure that the thing on the shelf still works

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Gaps in applying service design approaches

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Simplifying service design

Reducing service design to its methods and process

Focus on process, missing the idea and concept

• It really is about the idea and the concept and what you want to get delivered, rather than about the showmanship of the process, the purest process.[...] I think full-stack service design is where the gap is. It’s not thinking about it beyond the user experience, and I think that is a real, huge gap that I see at the moment. I’m interested in people that look around the world and go: ‘how’s that service delivered? What’s the model? What’s the business model behind it? How’s it making money, how’s it measured? I think that is really important. It’s a practice, and process, we’re just missing that whole trick a lot of the time

Service design is just UX

• I was quite of candid earlier in one of my answers about the de-evolution of service design into a lot of workshops and stuff. [...]. I guess I’ve got onto places where they’ve been like, we’ve already done this before, [or] we’ve done the SAtSD and it didn’t work. And I was like, ‘well, tell me what you did’, and ‘we run this workshop, we held this workshops with young people, and we did this’ and I was like ‘what did you design?’ Did you have any interaction designers with you? Was there any developers to help? I think SD is sometimes is too focused on the UX, the sexy thing, and it is not reeling down to... Like a lot of our work is actually really dull. The kind of... well it’s not dull, we can tell a good story about it, but you know
• A service isn’t just the user experience, which is where service design unfortunately lays most of its stuff. There’s full-stack service design, so there’s all these things that are beneath the surface, that power... design decisions, accidentally, that make up the experience, and that’s like policy design, financial models, procurement, technical stack decisions, organisational charts... they are all designs, and I think that often forgotten [...] full-stack service design, is a nice way of seeing the world, of helping anybody in the organisation see they are part of the user experience. Even if you work in the, you know, procurement team, you make decisions around procurement, technology...

Just a fun workshop activity

• In some ways I think we have taken mighty full steps forward. I other ways I think that we regressed as a discipline. I think we’ve become overly simplified, and it needs to be very academicised or complex for people to do. [...] it’s almost being over productised as a thing. It’s taking us away from the point of I am actually interested in service design models and how you go on to deliver; more into a kind of fun workshop activity, and I am quite critical of that, sorry. So it has been a good evolving but also a sort devolving a little bit

Just follow the Double Diamond

• When the the Design Council created the double diamond, they were actually visualising what is design thinking, what is the process. I know we all have different views about the double diamond and how it's actually a squiggle, and it's confusing, and it's not actually a nice tidy diagram when you are actually applying it
• I kind of get really sick of the double diamond, without being disrespectful. I’m not sick of it, I use it actually, It’s very useful as a mental model. But what it inferes is that you do service design and then it is done

De-professionalising service design

Anyone can service design

• If you just call your patient feedback survey user experience, then that’ll do. I put it at an extreme, but there is a bit of a balance that we haven’t quite got right. I’ve seen in the last years, from ‘zero influence and zero awareness’ in health about service design and we are going to ‘everyone does it. We reaching a point will we have to backtrack a bit and say: ‘yes, but it is also a profession, and there’s people who can do it well, who have experience on it, and should be doing this job, and not just anyone. Especially when it comes to involving patients and users, that is so important. Cause actually, it is not good having people without training run around and interview patients about end-of-life experience. I think I've seen it go from zero to ‘everyone does it, and I think we need to find a balance
• Hear more and more service design language being applied. And that's great. But then, I feel like there has been a negative side effect of that success, because it gets a bit emptied out. I think there is a useful balance between encouraging people To think and speak in this way, and saying: ‘Oh, a lot of things that you are doing I'm probably in line with service design. And that’s really great. And I think that helps, We all need funding and difference to be Able to do service design innovation. It can also lead to de-professionalising. It's just like: ‘ oh, anyone can do it, You don't really need any special skill, You don't need to hire a service designer you can do just pics of it’

SD training being too simple and not mature enough

• When you see service design training, I often think that it’s way too simple, it’s kind of like ‘do some storyboarding, now come up with an idea’. That’s not how life works, really. I think we just need to kind of mature our narrative around what the role service design is and what designers are in businesses, organisations, and systems. So great evolution, but de-evolutioning a little bit towards the end of that. But that’s natural and it happens across every practice, so I am not really overly critical, it’s just I really take this stuff quite seriously and want to make sure that we are really matured and more respected

Mis-using service design

SD being commodified

• I don't know how arm strong organisations are in the rules they have to follow and the way they write something. It all seems totally bizarre, and who knows where they came from, but to be able to open the discussion about the involvement on the organisation side or the citizen side, because it is a bit harder in those instances. But service design has been commodified, depending on how it's been bought and who's wanting and what they are wanting it for...

The commercial side of SD carries into public service

• And I also think about the origins of service design being more commercial minded practices like marketing or product design. And I think service design still carries with it into public service some of these things about need, and then that's linked to use and consumption. So how are we deploying service design in such a way in public service is not critically analysing the service itself, along side the external facing research and design stuff, and then what do we do if we think something is not needed

Service design being pushed into a space beyond its capacity

• I think it is a real danger with service design that actually it is pushed into this space of Design for Good and we tackle a lot of things that are quite complex and beyond the capability and capacity of service designer. And then we start working in spaces and having big unintended consequences because you have not really understood the complexity

Service design being too utopian

One quote: That makes me think about service design as an industry, is it maybe too utopian? When we say we move into that space of people and environment? We are not going to solve climate crisis by ourselves, we’re not expert in this. That is just something I’ve been thinking about for a while. You know, climate crisis, human rights, sustainability, and it’s not don’t we are doing “how might we solve the climate crisis or racism” [haha] it‘s long time work.

Designer’s having own biases

Two quotes:

• I suppose that the barriers come down to one’s own assumptions and biases, and the language that one uses
• So you go into it with lots and lots and lots of bias and prejudice. And although you try to rationalise that through, you are just going into a situation that you’re not really sure about

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