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Things we're missing in our SD practice

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Missing support: no access to mentoring / coaching
  • I think I would say for me personally it‘s me having that access to coaching and mentoring. [...] So, I had coach for a bit, but she is not from a design background, it was more[job] related and that was really useful, but it was just not something applicable to my design work. You know inspirations, aspirations. So, I do kind of miss that. That kind of role model as a manager, I guess. She is great, but she comes from that background of traditional insight and engagement/ research in a public sector organisation. She is very open but still she doesn’t operate at the level I do, so it‘s just a difference.
Missing support: not having a designer in a leadership position
  • I would really like someone above, even just from a design perspective, who is above me [...], who could coordinate [ with other areas]
Missing support: no discussion about the emotional part of our work
  • The stress and mental health, and the emotional aspect of this, [the set up of a project] is a perfect time to open up and say what we are going to do together, it's going to be hard, what can we put in place to support each other? How can we be safe? If you're just turning out like doing this service design stuff, there is no room for having those discussions.
Missing skills: prototyping
  • But we kind of missing that in between prototyping but that‘s where we are at the moment
Missing skills: storytelling
  • I don’t think people know how to tell stories, I don’t think they know what is a good story necessarily
Missing skills: lack of awareness of own gaps
  • being aware of what your gaps are right? there is no set skills sets I don't think. There are soft skills and it's nice if you can use illustrator and all those things, but really it's more about being aware of what you can and can't do. It's not the same as accountancy where it's like can you do X Y Z on a spreadsheet, it's more nuance than that. Everybody has gaps, it's just about being aware of them
Missing skills: lack of questioning our own discipline
  • Some critical discussions don't go on, but there is also not a lot of questioning around what's being asked of designers and researchers, what is happening, what will happen to people after all that ethical framework I guess. It's just assumed that service design is the right thing to do all the time, in the ways that we have been taught to do it. So there is a kind of dogma there that hasn't been questioned. I think this questioning is opening more now, which is great. Maybe I've been impatient. [...] I take these conversations [from other communities] and bring them to a general level, so where can I see these in service design for example
Missing skills: going beyond research and implementing ideas
  • One thing that is difficult in service design is to track the impact of it, and the implementation. There are lots of cool projects where you come up with good ideas but you don't get actually existing or are not actually tested properly?or design research, a company does a lot of research, it's sounds very exciting but it doesn't go anywhere afterwards, it's just a really nice project, which is a bit frustrating because you know, we've done all that work, and it's all very exciting and it's not going anywhere. That's a bit of a gap in SD, there are many examples of really interesting work and research and some have been implemented, but maybe it's a bit difficult to do


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Gaps in the Service Design Education

screenshot of the part of the big Miro board showing the post it for this theme of the research

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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.

Facilitation training is very important but not taught in education
  • the most important set of skills and knowledge are about facilitation. Cause you are not taught how to do that in education. In formal education, you are taught how to stand up and give a presentation, you learn how to use your voice, how to use the PowerPoint. Yeah, moderately useful skills to have
Struggling working within a wider team who might not know what a SD role is
  • lot of those people struggle, when they reach the workforce and when they quickly need to learn how to behave within a wider team, while it‘s necessary for them to explain what their role is and how that is used amongst the project team
Involving industry to adjust say how academia should teach SD
  • we potentially need to do a better job as the industry of going back to academia and saying this is how we can help people being more ready for their first jobs or we start looking elsewhere
Learning to deal with public sector hierarchies and structures
  • the hierarchies aren’t there to support our work. I don't really know how we get around that. We've been trained with an agency mindset, where you never have that problem. You just do a Project, and then move on. I wonder if [ universities] should do public sector design course



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