Clusters of insights - quick access
How to improve your practice
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List of clusters of insights
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Bringing learning from outside SD: broadening your knowledge and thinking
- I'm always thinking where the information and practice I'm learning from different disciplines, and always bringing it back to how is that the same or different or could better service design practice of mine. [...] So I'm less active in service design community than I am elsewhere and then bringing things back in service design conversations. I just have a desire for a broader knowledge base
- I tend to not actually read that much around design processes because I feel I’m learning from my peers, I need to be broadening my thinking
Think of service models and how things are made / be creative, find interesting ways of solving problems
- the ability to think about service models for is very important. And someone that is just interested in that. One of the questions I ask people is: ‘where do you get your inspiration from’ and an interviewee was like ‘I love looking at stuff and how did that get made’, and I was like, ‘oh, my goodness, let’s hire them now'
- senior level,[...] they seem really competent because they can [...] take you through a process, project was finished on time and on budget, really competent tools, led the team[...] But it was a really uninteresting the solution
SD is not rocket science
- Service design is not rocket science. It really instinctual stuff. That's what I'm trying to get across to folks
What skills are needed, what we are trying to achieve - learned from managing previous projects
- I just have learned from managing projects before, from consultancy side and trying to do similar things so scope out things in the right way, look how to set up and the skills needed, what we‘re trying to achieve
Not afraid of presenting stuff at an early stage
- not be afraid to present work when it‘s not quite ready, which I learned originally through art school but I‘ve been doing it since. So not having that fear of it not being perfect and knowing that I will get more form it if it‘s not perfect
The context of design is ever shifting - knowing how to learn
- It's shifting all the time, so it is a never-ending job, the skills and knowledge that you need to have as a designer. I think that the key skills that all designers need is about how to learn
Community driven: show the community side first the evidence coming from it
- Make it a community effort rather than a top down thing. Because a top down thing just doesn’t work
- it's about finding good quality sources, good evidence, and also good quality community evidence, that's my starting point, I always show the community side first, before I show anything else because this is what matters to them. The other stuff just backs it up, when you put it to funders, and your local authority, that sort of things
Design world bubble - looking for a method to get out of it
- on Twitter, I hear from the same people. So, I don’t know rather that’s design world bubble or not. I‘m wondering how to broaden that. Or whether a different format could work better. Asking a question or sharing a half-finished thing, that feels right for me, but I‘m wondering if the method is right.
We need to take time to reflect and integrate this in our ways of working
- I know it depends on time and capacity, but it is the reflection and actively thinking that through, and holding yourself up against those criteria and those standards even doing retrospectives, working as a cycle. It wouldn't be so hard to say: well actually these are the things that we want to be able to reflect on at the end of that. To integrate that into ways of working, and come together as a full team
Building capacity in your organisation
Skills up everyone: teach the SD language and facilitation
- if you lift the baseline, and everyone knows how to facilitate a good process, then it can only be beneficial for the people who are the experts because everyone knows the language
- Some of the best designers, [...] were not trained as a service designer, but they found that they were designing services through their own work. How [to] become a UX or Service designer, it's usually through experience of designing services. It doesn't mean you were classically trained as a designer [...]"if you raised the baseline across charities and across business where everyone knows the language, some of the tools and methods, who to lean on and how to facilitate a good process then it can only be good for us
- we have skilled up and we have trained people in it. So now we have quite a few people across the council, who had some level of service design training
Invest in your people instead of paying consultant to do it
- It's that thing about investing in the right thing and the right place. [...] I'd rather spend 20 grand or whatever that is, to put someone through a course, like a master, that will cover the cost of the courses and expenses towards it, and that investment will give much more than these 2 or 3 days of consultants
Continious improvement / Mentor
Let other people lift you up
- I listened to a podcast a couple of years ago, I haven’t listened to it recently, by two friends in America, and they had this thing called shine theory. It‘s this idea of I don’t shine if you don’t shine. You can be the best in whatever it is you do, but if you don’t encourage people around you, you’ve got nothing to lift you up. That’s kind of what I see MegaMentor doing
- I would like to be a service designer where continuous improvement is high up in my agenda, you know, prototyping, implementing things and then learning from that implementation and developing patterns all the time. Cause I think that is a chance we have in the public sector, and so perhaps we need to get away a bit from that agency skillset that we all have
Learn from a mentor or someone you can bounce off of
- Kind of continuous improvement? just because you have been doing it for a while doesn't mean that you still would not benefit from a mentor or someone else who might have been doing it in a different field or a bit longer, or with a different skill set that you want to bounce off of
Mentoring to meet new people outside your normal circle
- I was quite interested in the mentoring scheme [...] because it's a way to meet others that you would not meet in your typical circles and it's a different you could be mentored by someone, that would be nice for me as well, having someone outside of my day to day but who's got a bit more experience that I can learn from, and then vice versa. So I do mentor a lady she used to be an intern and now she works for a different company but I still mentor her, I enjoy it, so I suppose I do a little bit
Sharing and learning
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List of clusters of insights
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A place of best practice (GDS style) - Connects to SAtSD)
- I don’t know. I keep on thinking of it would be great if in Scotland there was something more like the Government Digital Service (GDS) that the UK government has. [...] in general, a place of best practice. You know, people are always look at the GDS service manual. A couple of weeks ago they had that accessibility week and a lot of people were going to those sessions. We need things like that. More things like that. How do we do this in Scotland?
- I think there is a little bit of a missed opportunity in Scotland to learn more from GDS and NHSx. I'm sure they have a lot of problems but, to an extent, they have done it. They have somehow moved through the mess. When I check out their Blog posts, and medium articles, and whatnot; they don't have to speak about clinical safety and clinical modelling, they just speak about design. How do they manage that? Every time I try to do something, I end up with [other organisational priorities] being more important. [...] I feel I need to know more about what they are doing. It's good to have a community of practice in Scotland. But at the same time, I think we are all more or less at the same level, trying to work out these things. What we also need, I think, is someone who has done it. And you know, GDS, they are just neighbours. They speak in the same language and they work in a similar system. But it could be other nations, other places. I don't know. But I think we should expand our view a little bit. It would absolutely need to be adapted, but we can at least look at it. It feels like the elder sibiling sometimes. I wasn't even that enthusiastic about them before I joined [the public sector] and think, "my god, how did they do it?"
Openness
- I think that making things open and shareable is really important
Experimentation & sharing learning: what works?
- We are all experimenting. We are just trying stuff out, a lot of it doesn't work, some of it does. So this stuff that works, what do we take forward? What is positive? What could other people make use of?
Opportunity: Alternative learning paths
- The model of higher education is bust. This notion of: ‘you save up thousands and thousands of pounds to put yourself into eternal debt to do a full-time 12-month Masters course on the other side of the world’. No. Forget it. That's not how we learn
- I am very encouraged [by initiatives like] MegaMentor.
- There is a guy that works at GDS [that] got into service design not by a master's course but going along to [events, such as] GovJam or Global Service Jam; [...] reading stuff and doing stuff online.
A vision
- What we need to do is to create a framework that people can learn within, and you have mentors that can help people advance within those frameworks. And so, you go along to GovJam, and that is part of that framework. Now you need a process by which you can reflect on what you've learnt from that and you can apply to something else, and someone mentors you through that process. And then, you know, you might do short courses, it might be a 90-minute online course or something. But those things all fit together and we, as a community, need to figure out a framework for that. Whether you have that credited, I have no idea. Something that is robust, but enables people to learn and develop in a disciplined way, but not in a heavily structured way that Involves big buildings and salaries of directors and all that kind of stuff. We want something that Is democratic, that is open, that is peer supported and peer encouraged. And it does the job of encouraging people into this new field and helping them design and determine what it is going to be like in the future. Because service design in 5-years time, 0-years time, I have no idea what it is going to be like. But I know It will be completely different to what it is now.
Sharing small successes / integrating reflection into how we work
- Focusing the community on the actual delivery of it, and then pointing to it and saying: ‘this is the delivery of it’. It doesn’t have to be a massive end-to-end transformation piece, that I think people often ask for. It is just you know, we have a principle, it is this, look at how I demonstrated it in this context. And not to be too concerned about the big picture. It’s always gonna be small steps towards it, and to kind of normalise it, and to get it integrated into how people work. We have to be able to shout from the rooftops ‘This is what we described, this is what we said it is’. Look at us in this team, taking steps towards doing that. I don’t think that is a huge ask of the community, but I think it’s about helping and really think, you know, after doing a project, going back to the framework and say: ‘ok, well, what is out of all of that we did really well. Or even before a project, sitting down and saying ‘here are the principles of the SAtSD, here is UCD criteria for the service standard, ‘how do we do that before we even go into delivery’. And then at the end of it reflect on what worked and what didn’t, and how do we improve it the next time. That is the only way that we will ever make progress with it and to be able to tell those stories. And if we don’t consciously do that, say we are going to do that, it’ll never happen
Community Ownership - Who should create these spaces for sharing?
- [It] would have to be of an organic community initiative. I think if you would have something that came from a particular sector or from the government, it would immediately be boxed into that corner, where it‘s coming from. And that‘s the thing we need to avoid. [... there are] community-led initiatives being started up [elsewhere]. I think that would be the way to do it. But how to get there, I‘m not entirely sure.
- There is so much out there, so much different organisations can collaborate and lead on, so it would be interesting to see how we as a community can take ownership of these things and can lead on different bits of it. More of the prototyping and implementation stages would be interesting
Share learning across public, third & private sectors
- It would be good to see better relationships amongst third and public sector practitioners and even private sector practitioners.[...] I'd like there to be a bit more focus on what we have in common. There is a bit of tendency of “oh, I do this, and you do that and it‘s different”. But it‘s actually not. And by getting our heads together I think we can learn a lot more form each other than we do at the moment
- Government generally is quite good at being open. So I think it should be about building on that a bit more. and continue with that. It's one of the positive things in the public sector and 3rd sector, is that you can talk about stuff. And you can be quite open about it is you do and the stage it is at and the problems that you've had, It's quite a positive thing, so I think more of that?
Third sector needs to share resources as well as knowledge
- I think we're doing [things] that connect charities very well, [and] having webinars, briefings, WhatsApp groups... But it's almost like, it's doesn't go deep enough. You're not sharing resources, you're not working on the same projects, you're just kind of tuning into what other people are doing,
Open source way of working
- Some kind of open source way of working where you actually open up what worked well on a project. [In] the public and not-for-profit sectors, it should not be an issue to open up all the documentation on how [...] they have tackled a particular issue in a particular community and how this service is now up and running and how it was co-produced by various different partners working together, [...] we should not be scared of sharing what the process looked and what the failures were.
- [An open source way of working] might fall down in charities [that] rely on donations and reputation, on their brand. If you are very open about what your long project looks like, that might scare some people, that might scare some marketing or funding people. But I would not be scared about being as open as possible about the process and the different stages, it can only be good for the SD community