Clusters of insights - quick access
Learning
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Ways of learning
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.
Self learning
- I'm at a level where I can pick things up and as long as I've got the crumbs, the sources etc etc, I can figure things out and then chase people up on the back of that
Learning by trial and error
- [Remotely?] Well, I don’t know, we can try things out, we can experiment, we can learn from those experiments, we’re just learning
Listening / watching people
- I‘m a bit of a looker, I like to watch what other people are doing and also watch how other people are sharing what it is what they are doing
- listen to my staff members, I think, listen to the team seeing what they‘re bringing in. Already the new members of our team are bringing in new perspectives and new approaches and I‘m trying to see, understand for myself, how does this fit into my understanding, my view of what we need to achieve and what is the bigger picture thing and how does it all fit together
Some kind of internship: get a a course and give back in work hours
- In procurement, they have that thing called the community clause [...] I'm quite happy to do the course, 20hours a week, and give my community 20hours a week work. There is an accommodation to be made that I can pay for that, it will take me through the study, and I give them this work time not only to teach, but to be part
Learning on the role / by doing
- You learn stuff from people, [...] it's the informal thing you learn by working with different people, this is the main way
- I don’t know what skills I need until I’m put into a new project’. So I suppose I very much have the approach of ‘I just want to work on lots of different projects and in lots of different teams. And that’s how I learn best as well. I don't learn very well having to read stuff
- It's difficult to know what I will need until I need it. And then, you should be working in a team where you can learn those skills from other people
- We need to understand the context. And you can’t really learn that, you need to go and speak with them and communicate. A lot of it is about talking to people who have been In the mechanism of government for a long time and really understand it. [...] that has to be done during work time
- I tend to think that you‘re learning a lot more by practice anyway. You know, you learn on the job, on what you‘re doing there because it‘s a real scenario. That seems to me more valuable or that is more applicable.
- There is a bit of a balance - while working on a project you can learn a lot from colleagues, as you are working through stuff and that's an important part of what you do.
Peer learning - sharing - building your own community of learning
- I work really hard to get a kind of deep ecosystem around me that's got all these beautiful things that I can interact with
- Peer learning exchange or peer learning opportunities, development opportunities, I think this would be really cool. [...] I'm constantly talking to people through the week, I have a lot of conversations with them all, and they are receptive, we are always passing through each others
- one of the most valuable things we can do is to connect with others from other institution, from other areas. And even to think beyond user experience design. I think it‘s important to connect with other like-minded people. Sometimes I go to the product meet-up
- We try to build that kind of community element. So, there are community meet-ups as well. we need to bring other people on board. It‘s just we need to advocate for and sell it as an approach
- I feel confident to say now that we’ve done over the years and I feel very proud of, and people had said to us they like this about us; we invested in holding up the voices of others and creating events and platforms. we are there to raise the voices and start the conversation
Learn by being engaged in a community / organisation
- Another thing I enjoy doing as part of my day job is being part of the SDN network [...]I got involved there and just the connections you make via the people in the committee and then through there because they all work in various sectors, public sector, private sector, some of them are involved in academia, and in a lot of countries as well, so you get different perspective as well
Search online, ask others
- In terms of what I want to know, no idea. In terms of how I found that out, usually intranet, and it's just about searching, finding out a sensible resource which is always the fun bit, and then trying to see if anyone is saying the same thing
- I find myself more drawn to the people, who say “hey, I‘m wondering about this thing, can anyone help me out with it”? So, I found most recently that I‘m taking this stance of asking a question and inviting people to either take it on themselves, which is lovely, or finding people that are thinking along the same lines to then work through that problem with. Or hearing something totally new and exciting about a different way to approach
- It's always nice to know, particularly when it's government folks, if you get to know them and build a relationship and you take them to one side and go: what's the real story, what's going on? there is a bit of that that I'm missing at the moment. I was at a gathering, and I was able to grab a few folks from the network and ask them what has been going on? what's coming? what should I be looking out for? So that's what I'm missing. I miss that and hope to find a way into that again
Exposition to different contexts / moving between different sectors
- It is good to be put in different contexts sometimes, in different projects, to kind of challenge your perceptions
- Quite often we plan a career within design, and we are drawn to either public or private. And people kind of see themselves as a designer for public services. And actually, I think there is a lot of benefit of moving between sectors and gaining experiences and sharing skills amongst them. I think it‘s quite helpful to encourage people to spend a little bit of time on different disciplines, in different environments as a designer. Although I desperately want to build up the design scene within the public sector in Scotland, I can only see that being strong if people have experiences elsewhere as well.
- That collaborative mix of tackling a brief that was completely out of the work place, [...]and just tackling a completely different brief with a completely different set of designers. It was really refreshing. I brought a lot of the facilitation that I do [...] for online workshops, tools that we should use, how do we get from a lot of research to the solution space...
- It's good to work with people outside the organisation. I was able to test the facilitation tools, my own facilitations skills in workshops, to come away with an understanding of how other organisations are working and what tools they are using
Attending events or even speaking at events
- I do enjoy going to different events as well. it's nice to hear from other folks and what they have been doing
- Another thing is probably going to talk and conferences, I get to do that but it kind of varies, times and things, lockdown was actually kind of good for that actually, because everything was online and you could attend things in different countries, from that point of view it was very cool. Although it is work, but it doesn't feel like it, you know going to an event or a workshop or something is quite fun
- I like the Pechakucha style and I think i'm going to modify that a little bit for this audience now, because it's very much what I have learn from this audience from Zoom, some folks just speak. Some are better than others, but give me the nuggets and some context and that's should work then when I look at that, I can understand it.
- Yeah, meet-ups, Slack channel and conferences. I try all of those things and connecting with people
Bringing learning opportunities to my work
- I look for opportunities to bring that to my work. [Participating in a network and running events] takes up time, and I’ve talked to my line managers about doing that and how to bring that into our way of working in general, so I’ve tighten both together
Going to jams
- Sometimes it's during my personal time, when it's and evening event, or jams, I haven't been to a jam for years, but that was giving up your personal time to go and work with others, do something quite different and learn new skills
Inside organisation training and learning
- There's people that we reach out to learn. [...] [In the company], we have almost a weekly learning session just now. So we get practitioners in from loads of different stuff, sharing their practice. {At the company level], we are a big community now, we have ‘show and tells’ and stuff;. We are sharing, we have big ones three or four times a year with the whole company, so you learn projects and we have unconferences and stuff
- I'm probably doing more learning and development than I was in any other job. [...] through running sessions on competency-based interviews, facilitation of workshops, [...] they were able to roll this out as a piece of training for everyone else. [That] means that, when you set up a workshop in Miro or Mural, all the people already know, sort of use it before you even get to your own workshop, which is really beneficial
Learning through writing as a reflective exercise
- I enjoy writing about personal development and like trials within design work. I find it helpful as a reflective exercise
Learning through reading
- Most recent books I've read Lou Downe good Services, Validating product ideas (Tomer Sharon) because I was struggling personally with this big complex projects I wanted to get to the bottom of how to prioritise things, so reading is a big part
- I literally I'm one of those people that orders books all the time and half read them. So like, I'm a bit of knowledge junkie, like I just wanna know stuff all the time so... I gravitate to so many different topics
- Do a fair bit of reading in my work time, but I also do a hell of a lot in my personal time. All the blogging I do is in my personal time
- Reading in the evening, attend meet-ups...
Useful resources
- I can recommend GDS, they’ve got a lot of very articulate Articles and what not around how it's useful, and we borrow liberally.
About learning courses
Please note: This was mostly one person talking about it so might not be representative - Would need more research
Too much for beginners / not enough for advanced
- From a formal point of view, there is not a huge amount out there in terms of like formal stuff a lot of workshop you take is more aimed at people who are maybe new to service design, there's lot of bootcamps, and like "3 days welcome to service design" thing there's maybe pockets of workshop for things
Quite a time commitment
- I was sent to service design course. It looked interesting to me, so I signed up, which is quite a commitment actually for an employer because it is quite a big time commitment. It‘s a professional development award. So, it got four modules for which they recommend you forty hours of study each and there are two camps. So, [it was] six days spread about two or three months. And then lots of studying around that
Not much learning from the course
- It was quite an interesting course but I‘m not quite sure how much I‘ve really learned from the course itself. Maybe more through the reading I was doing around that. Spending the forty hours on it was maybe quite good for me but I‘m not sure how much it really enhanced my understanding
Expectations not met (only one person)
- Maybe it has to do with my expectations on that course. I was expected a bit theory like design theory, which we did kind of got, but a lot of it I felt was quite superficial
Allows to have time to learn in different ways
- [...] busy with training. The [organisation] has actually been really good to allow me to do that stuff - a combination of [...] online training sessions [...], reading books, definitely keep me on my toes
Learning needs / wants
There is a really wide range of learning needs / wants. For most of them it was only one or two participants expressing it.
List of clusters of insights
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Some think they have nothing to learn [not the interviewee but people they have worked with]
- They said they were at that stage where they no longer had to read books .... for me you should never be at that stage,
- If you are going to be good at a subject, you need to know what other people are saying about that subject
Using data, AI and working with people with these skills
- How to use data better
- I'm really interested in the analytic side of things, but it's something that personally I'm not really good at [...], there is a lot of data enabling services but then also the analytics side, for the measurement side, so I think it's something I don't really know enough
- from a data analytic point of view that would be helpful as a service designer to help me to have a better understanding of like how to use these things or even how to work with others who have those skills.It's unusual to have those skills in your project team. Maybe it's about working more closely with data analytical people
- I think there is a knack for what it is that you gather and how you analyse that, and that there is no bias in your data. [...] And more and more with AI, biases, understanding the data side of things would be really helpful
Visual skills and communication
- There are probably some technical and visual design skills that I do not have, it can be complicated in a blended team where people are coming from a visual background for example, partly because the way I tend to express myself and produce things tends to be very text based. So I would really love and I've been practicing doing things like visual notes taking and trying to express my thoughts in sketches instead of words. I'm finding it really difficult because I'm un-learning all these things so I would really love to develop that
Really listening to people / language & communication (one person)
- Really it's about people talking and at the same time you got people really listening, listening properly, that's a skill in itself
- Now more than ever, we need to be a bit more exacting in our communication and what we want to convey and why, and likewise, so that a range of people can understand it and now we have this multilingual society, you have subtitle, you have the written form you can have translation
Achieving good outputs / practical advice instead of templates (one person)
- “How to avoid being biased” or “how to write a good interview script”, or “how do you interview people”
- It was more “here is a template, off you go and speak to someone”. Not much about how to make that the output is going to be good
Understanding how government works, how design fits in it, policy making
- learning about how design fits in and what is appropriate In terms of design in that context [SG]. I think there is quite a lot in terms of the scaling that I need to just really understand the nuts and bolts of how government works. So in terms of the policy profession, what do policy makers do, how do they think?
- there’s a whole range of thing that are on offer on the Scottish Government because it’s a policy environment and they have been revisiting and relooking at what the policy profession looks like in the Scottish Government so that’s a really good opportunity to look at how they are thinking that through
- Looking at what is happening in different areas and what does that look like at the very beginning of a piece of work for someone who sits in policy or what is it that you are being asked to do by a Minister for example
Guidance, framing what we should be doing for each stage of work - set expectations
- Some more guidance for some things... I flip between this desire for more guidance for particular parts... like when I am running a discovery, what should I be doing in that space? How should I be acting and behaving? And what are the expectations on me? Instead of being frustrated with those expectations. You know, service designers are very positive in one way and they are really negative in other way, because the project wasn’t scoped correctly, or you haven't got the right time-frame in
remote facilitation, how to make it work for people
- everything to do with online facilitation, what works and what doesn't work. Technically how that does work, what works, what doesn't work, and how do you evolve it and stuff. [...] So it's about learning stuff ourselves, but also about learning what other people want to use and what they are capable of using at the moment, but how you can encourage them forward. Because it's all about how you empower them with tools that enable them to collaborate with each other; not with us, that's not important, it's between them
System thinking
- I have been really interested in systems thinking approaches
Inclusivity, BLM (Black Lives Matter)
- I'm reading a lot about the black lives matter at the moment, I've ordered like a significant amount of books to try and make sure that I am educated on that
Social justice, responsibility, how social systems works
- Understanding more complex nuances around social justice and social responsibility and how social systems work. Definitely working in that space. Reading a lot about social justice and anti-racist books and novels, that’s were my head is at at the moment. It’s far more oriented towards things outside of design
- I am also more interested in that future space, strategic future. Learning how you implement that
Coding
- I wish I could code properly. I taught myself to code and I made websites. So I understand code at an Ok level, but I would really like to be able to code software. It would be my dream. I will probably take some time out in the next couple of years and I think I might engage in that. so I am looking at courses, and loads of stuff online
One participant had needs around learning Leadership / management skills because of a new job role
Become a leader / more design leadership
- I‘m trying to figure out how to grow as a leader and what leadership means. And then figuring out do I want to stand in the design industry and then also what does design leadership mean to me. So, I think that kind of lacks in public sector organisations
- I guess my position is a little bit different now because now where I‘m a manager rather than a practitioner as such, I need to do less and less on the ground like user research, I need to manage other people, who are doing this. So, this is where my focus is, learning how to let go some of it and how to coach people. Managing people isn’t new to me but [...] it‘s not only that I‘m managing people, but I‘m trying to do that coordinating beyond my peers
leadership meetups
- I‘ve been part of the thing called design leadership meetups, [...] And I think this would be extremely helpful for me because I think this is the thing I need mostly now
Understanding future role (as a design leader)
- I guess for me it‘s just understanding what my role is. Because there will come a point, where I will be no longer involved in any kind of practice at all very much. So, the question for me is, how do I keep in touch with that? What is best practice at the moment? What does the practitioner look like in the modern world? I think that is something I have to think very carefully about.
From design to management
- I don’t necessarily want to be a manager, but this is where I found myself ending up in. [...] So, I‘ve tried to balance my old job as well as trying to take up some of the management stuff and having these conversations with other managers.
Others thing about learning
List of clusters of insights
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Being able to apply learning the learning is important
- The next step is now to leverage that network internally as well as leverage the network nationally to try to get more people involved in those projects and to use those skills because it is all good training but if they are not gonna use it, we don’t need to bother. Because the worry is, we train a lot of people, but then the people just go back and have to go on with their day job and not been able to really use it enough
- I think there is always a risk that we can spend too much time doing things like formal training, without thinking how we are going to use that formal training or what that formal training changes in our approach
- ’ve been sent on an introduction to leadership training course [...] it was a brilliant course. [...] The struggle I had initially was applying it because for the first six month being in the position, I didn’t really have a team, it was basically me.
Learning reflection
- Short term goals: I‘m definitely more of a short-term goal type of person. I‘ve also struggled to say that is where I want to be in five years’ time, or this is want I want to be doing even this time next year. Because I always write quite a broad statement and then I find it difficult to know what to attach to it
- Start with how you want to do things differently: What I found more helpful for me is to start each project or each phase of a project with an intention of how I want to work differently. Tools I want to try out or a method of presenting I saw someone else doing or a way of telling a story and involving the team in. I give myself shorter periods of time to do that. I found this helpful in terms of feeling that I‘m also trying different things out and that I‘m always growing.
- I don't even know where to start. I have a long list
Skills to have
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How our skills are perceived
List of clusters of insights
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Distinction from other disciplines
SD are not very different to other roles
- Actually the things we consider like the skills that sets up a service designer, that sets us apart from other designers or other public sector people, civil servants, is actually quite a small part of what the role actually is
Tensions to other disciplines
- There are so many other people, that you work alongside, who do very similar things. Working alongside business analysts, or working alongside product owners, that actually you can get a little bit tangle in terms of what your job role is.
Expected to be super heroes (have the whole skills set)
Context dependant
- [The skills needed of the designer] depend on the project. Should be recruiting designers to roles based on what is needed
Different designers, different contributions (details view of process vs very high level)
- I don’t tend to do well in the micro-detail process of a services, it’s more on the big goal. I joined a few boards so I could actually build my confidence, expertise, and seeing more 50000 feet rather than 10 feet
Don't have the whole skillset is good as you can be challenge by those who have different skills
- The key thing is that you put designers with a team that maybe have those skills anyway, and then it’s peer support, [...] often, we are put out there on our own, but one person does not have this whole skillset. And we shouldn't do, because innovation comes when you are challenged by other people's perspectives
It should be ok not to know
- Retain that kind of naivete and that kind of neutrality that we go in and ask stupid questions. We shouldn’t have all the skills and solutionising at that initial stage
Gradient from: “anyone can do SD after a 1/2 training session” up to: “you need a masters plus years of experience”
Some think only experts can do Service design
- I find designers who have been doing it for a long time or have a big name for themselves are very skeptical about other people doing design. I think I'm on the fence. Because if you talk to someone like that, [...] they think it's bad that other people are doing design because they are not experts in it and it dilutes the quality I think it's just wrong when you hear... it's almost like a head chef mentality that "only I can do this, and nobody else can do this". That's my general view of how design has changed. We have got better at implementing it within businesses and charities. We should not really be scared that it's becoming more common knowledge.
Wrong image of what the skills of a SD are
- you get this picture that a service designer is a person, who either does research themselves or works with researchers, produces a hell lot of personas and journeys maps and diagrams and then maybe makes some prototypes of varying degree of fidelity and then probably makes something like a blueprint. We educate ourselves that it is our job to make things and you produce diagrams. So, we‘re seeing a lot of people coming out of university being able to produce really nice diagrams. And one of the things I‘m reflecting on in these conversations is that this is such a small percentage of the job
How we facilitate, tell the story, take people on the journey
There is something here about the way we learn about the people we work with and how to engage them and take them on the journey.
List of clusters of insights
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Facilitation skills
This is mentioned in learning as well as a lot of participants realised they needed to improve this skill.
Importance of facilitation skills
- When you‘re working to design services, although that are the words within your job title, there are so many other people that you‘re working with, negotiating with, collecting pieces of information from, and kind of stich it all together. So much more of your time is spend coordinating that and facilitating that. So, I think, more than 50% of my time is spend facilitating in my job. It‘s either encouraging other people, or prompting at other people, or putting stuff in front of other people that‘s wrong so that they can make it more right. So, they can do the designing
- I am working on facilitation skills at the moment, that's good
- the most important set of skills and knowledge are about facilitation. How to take 30, 40 people through a process of learning so that they can support each other on that, that involves a completely different set of skills and knowledge.
- You have to be a good facilitator
Facilitating workshop
- Learning how to conduct workshops, planning for workshops to make them both exciting and engaging for people. The worst thing you want to do is to spend a whole day with people and they leave totally de-energised and totally unexciting about the thing you were talking about. So how do you create material and events that actually engage people? All of this contributes to be a good facilitator
Facilitation is also fundamental to creative leadership
- I think that it's not only fundamental to design practice but also to creative leadership in organisations. So that’s a whole other set of skills
Marrying public and 3rd sector perspective so they are focussed one 1 project or outcome
- I have found that [having worked] with public and third sector, and being able to share... be a conjugate to those two perspectives has been really positive, and kind of allowed them to be in the same room together if they are focused on a project or kind of outcome. It i massively complicated
Storytelling for engagement
People don't know how to tell a story
- I don’t think people know how to tell stories, I don’t think they know what is a good story necessarily.
Learning to use text and pictures to tell a story in social media and engage
- I think getting to that bit Where people are just saying look This is a problem we had in this context, here is what it looks like and this is what we did... I just think that would be really... it’s a really good place to encourage people to get to
Learning how to use metaphors and you need to be able to story tell them
- What I've learnt is that I didn't have that thing of a storyteller and an understanding of the power of a story on social media. It's how to do engagement differently, very much looking at the lived experienced sort of case studies, ideas and using it. How people consume content in a graphical way, a bit of text and a picture, so looking at this just now
Stakeholder engagement / Reality check
Learn to compromise, reality and stakeholder to take into account
- Simple things like stakeholder management, understanding... there’s a reality some times you have to learn more about other disciplines and about other ways of working. I think your ideas come along more complex, and you learn how to compromise a lot more
Get the balance between your vision and ideal and what you can implement practically
- You know, it’s not straight forward to change the world, and actually there are lots of things you need to influence. So just creating a nice vision isn’t gonna do it. So we need to be more effective at creating idealistic and visionary, but also practical. Things that can be changed and implemented. As much as I love reimagining how certain things could work, it is how you balance that with all these other things
Other:
Building relationships / listening and dialog, learning how to engage with people who are not familiar to SD
- How people have conversations, dialogs, interactions, how relationships are built. I think sometimes that skill isn't there, especially if researchers and designers are coming to an existing culture. That culture might include technical teams, very senior people. If that softer ability to descend well, or to have the simple conversations, or to get into really challenging research findings; if that skill isn't there, it just hurts everybody and it's probably a waste of money in the end. So there is this skill about listening and dialog in that, especially if design is new. [...]
- Many public services, especially are commissioning service design and service designers that are definitely not ready to be challenged, so this is back to the readiness
Learn about the organisation and then go and make an argument
- Learn all the materials and organisations, get yourself in the position of having to be in a meeting and make an argument. Go and put yourself in a position of looking at how something got made. And I think, that for me is probably what’s missing in terms of skillset. [...] That stuff and full stack staff, being able to make things happen in an organisation is really important
Understanding power & politics - the power relationship you are working within
- Design is about politics, about power, right? Power: how does it work? how is it exercised? why does some people have it, and some people don't have it? An understanding of power leads to to an understanding of a lot of other things like privilege and so forth. And that is really really important, so that designers understand the Power relationships they are working within, the dimensions of power but they exercise themselves and the need for empower others
Theatrical method: using a structure, dramatic arches in everything you do to engage people
- 3 days in terms of learning loads of things about theoretical methods but also about dramatic arches - which we hadn’t really thought of in terms of facilitation. And we have a started to apply that to everything we do. Because when you go to an event, go to an online event, go to a conference; part of your brain is expecting a movie, that same dramatic arc. It has to reach a climax point, it can't be a climate all the way through, You have to have a structure through it. But also you want something at the end that hosts people down. And understanding that from [the workshop] was hugely insightful, and how that helps people to learn. So, if there's something else that I would add, a ll designers need to learn about - it's not only politics, It's about theatrical method, cause that's how you engage with people and how you help people engage with others
Other about skills to have
List of clusters of insights
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Working in a team - build together - collaborate
- Learning how to work in a team and how to build ideas together and build up other people‘s ideas
- Generally I am pretty good at team working and pretty good at collaborating. I don’t think I hold space too heavily. I am quite open to how people think they should be working or what they should be doing. Team working is not an issue
Craft making / craft thinking so you look at the world in a different way
- Craft practice actually gives you a distinctive learning that can be applied in different ways. There are many brilliant service designers who have a background in textiles or jewellery. Craft learning gives you an approach to looking at the world in a very different way. [My interest was in] how do you get that very distinctive mentality and way of looking at the world when you put that in a different contexts
Curating information - where you choose to have your information
This links with - too many events - too many things out there - SD is a field that forces you to have a wide set of skills to and learn from a lot of sources
- I think the sparks for things that I then go and read, or watch or listen to, 95% of times comes from these Slacks things or Twitter and I've done a bit of an audit of my Twitter, the information I'm receiving is much different now than it was last year. There is something in that as well, where do we choose to receive our information and what benefit we would have coming outside of Service Design so we get other areas.
- There is so much going on just now, we are trying to refine that, it's a bit like when you do a desktop research, you can narrow it down, I've got my themes focussing on what I'm hearing, set to reflect a little bit and then say right ok, what question should we be asking etc... that's the way I do
Using patterns as an approach
- I see a lot of different organisations in the internet having those kind of pattern libraries, but it’s something I’m not completely sure how to get there. I think the way we get trained as service designers and generally talk about our work tends to be stuck in an agency model where you don’t necessarily have that option. YOu just... you are a consultant. You have a set of tools, you work with people to sort of fill them in, and then produce something, more or less finished in the end, and then push it out
- I am really interested in patterns as an approach, so i would like to which stage where Someone in [ my organisation] says, ‘this is an outpatient clinic that sees this many people a year, that I have an idea of what patterns we have in relation to outpatient cliniques and things like that
The soft skills
- So many people come for interviews, so talented, ah, they are so good, but they spent four years in university, and now because service design has evolved, and that’s why I call it the de-evolution I actually prefer meeting people from product design, architecture, and again, not everyone needs to come from a design background
- That’s an important distinction to make. We have lots of people who are not designers, but in a design context, [...] at a more junior level in the business, they are just really switched on and maybe worked part-time or worked in a bar while they were at Uni, or at a coffee shop and they get it
Service Design Education
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List of clusters of insights
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SD should be in the curriculum for anyone as an approach about how you think
- I think design led approaches to things should be part of the curriculum and in terms of academia, how people learn about SD and not necessarily to be a Service designer but more like that may not be your job, but it's an approach about how you think about things
Too many expectations
- We are expecting people to come out of service design courses within the universities after either a couple of years learning about design history and design as a process and map it or doing it as a one or two year masters at the end of something else
How: a lot of people coming through the same route (2 years of uni or SD courses)
- A lot of people arriving in service design have come through the same route [service design courses within the universities after either a couple of years]
How: put yourself in a position of looking at how something got made and make it better
- to most people I say ‘ditch the Masters and just go and work in a business and make it something better. Learn all the materials and organisations, get yourself in the position of having to be in a meeting and make an argument. Go and put yourself in a position of looking at how something got made. And I think, that for me is probably what’s missing in terms of skillset
How: self directed learning
- My Masters’ degree was self-taught and self-developed
How: no need for a masters
- Where do you find designers, because there is a growing demand for them, but is academia actually filling that demand, and where are they coming from, I suppose what skills should you have? does it really matter if you have a service design degree or is it more about how you think as a person. So from an academic point of view what does that mean? I think it's a whole other conversation though
- I advice people that say ‘how do I get into service design’ if they are doing a career change or trying to get into it from another discipline. Lot’s of people look at very expensive Masters courses. And I have to be careful what I say, because I really respect [that kind of training]. But going to a Masters if you want, you need the time in your life to go and do some introspective thinking and get over your impostor syndrome
Who: open up to diverse people not keeping a very straight, privilege white line of people coming to SD
- you trained your brain to think in different ways and then brought this different thinking into this discipline, makes you kind of magical in terms of how you can approach a problem. And I was like, why are we not doing this within the design industry? Why are we expecting people to go through the same pipeline and then come out different, come out as diverse as we need? We're not going to answer that question by maintaining a very privileged, very white pipeline of designers. We‘re not going to answer that
Who: bringing in different people with different background,lived experience
- All of those people coming into design jobs from other jobs, who previously been project managers, or musicians or other types of designers, all those people, who have fascinating brains and fascinating ways of walking through problems and telling stories, and people with lived experiences of the services, that we are designing, those are the people that I would love to see doing the job. Because I think they are more interesting than art school students