Clusters of insights - quick access
- Barriers
- Challenges - Strategies - limitations
- Gaps in being inclusive, accessible and ethical
- How we involve a community
- Barriers: organisational culture, mindset and environement
Barriers
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Organisational constraints & maturity
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Commissioning
- My starting point would always be: "how close can I get to having the user of this service on my team?" Those conversations are unlikely to get really far in something that is usually procured by a typical government framework for example
- I have had opportunities through certain projects to be very participatory. To date, it has always been through some unusual commissioning pathways, with characters who you would not have in projects like service design
- There is something about how commissioning happen or what's commissioned, or even the level of honestly the commissioners are willing to have about what they are actually trying to do
- [The] kind of mainstream typical commissioning pathway that I have been able to do research or service design projects have typically be the less participatory opportunities. The kind or weird wonderful and unusual pathways that have come through personal relationships or through different funding pathway like charities, those have always been more participatory.
Lack of awareness and skills
- Sometimes [public sector organisations] think they are doing it, but they are not. They are doing pretty much traditional consultation style and calling it research. And I mean, that’s fine, because that’s just you don’t know what you don’t know.
- In public services we're not always equipped to know what to do with that information
Time and resources
- It can take a bit longer than normal, because you are taking them on the journey and they need to be part of it and maybe their time is limited, so you are kind working around that. Time is an issue. [...] Time is a huge thing in that people might want to be involved but don't have the time and you just have to work with what you can
- The time and cost of learning a new skill, people might need [to] up-skill to deploy service design. [...] When you ask people to do things like discovery and testing, if they have never done things like that before, I think the resource against that feels too overwhelming
Organisational structures and culture
- Part of the reason is that at the moment it is a system that has cobbled together and grown together from a 100 year history
- Because of the way we have been operating for so long, very sort of paternalistic, and assuming that we are very needed and all these kind of things but if something emerges showing that it's maybe not so true, I don't know that we always know what to do?
- We’re still on the level of [user] and staff education. [We use} non-compliance when we talk about [users]. We have a long way to go
People’s experiences with design
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Previous experiences with design
- 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
Working with designers might feel strange
- Possibly, if you are used to work with consultant who kind of go off and do stuff and then come back and present it, then working closely with them might seem a bit strange, so maybe it's different expectations as well
Challenges - Strategies - limitations
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Recruiting and involving users
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Strategy: Being aware of limitations
- I guess you just have to drive the balance and being aware of the limitation of it. As you know, there is no perfect way of researching and there is always limitations to what you‘re doing. So, being aware of it helps
Challenge: Recruiting users
- We‘re reasonable lucky with that a lot of our users are internal and relatively easy to get. [...] in theory it‘s easy for us to get our hands-on [users, but] it can actually be surprisingly difficult
Strategy: regular user grouo
- [A regular] user group, kind of a focus group with the same people in it month after month after month. [...] I kind of used that group to test some things out in a face-to-face situation
- A user group is kind of appealing because you know they will turn up for example
Limitation: When users becvome part of the team, they become biased
- I would prefer to get a fresh set of eyes as much as possible
- [Having a regular user group] is not a brilliant way of doing things. [...] I think the project team understood why I said this. [...] By the second or third meeting they could see that [the users] had been so skewed by our own thinking, by previous activities. They were almost already members of the team and some of them actually became members of the team
Challenge: recruiting the right users - who wants to engage
- Some times when user-research and co-design is done, it’s always done with the... you know, if you do stuff with young children and young people, it always tends to be the good young people, or the over-researched young people, and I don’t always think we manage to reach the right people. So I think that’s a thing as well, and we’ve struggled with that
- Broadly speaking, what I‘ve noticed as well, and we don‘t fully understand this, but we‘re seeing it over and over again, is that we get a lot more female participants, we get more international [users] than Scottish [users], and we‘re not entirely sure what the reasons for that are
- You get different take ups from different [service areas]. I mean the way of reaching [research participants] is “find a friend in a [service area], who knows [users]”. You end up getting more participation from some [service areas] than others
Challenge: Vulnerable people and danger of trauma: ie. domestic violence, sexual abuse, people in high risk of suicide
- Engage with citizens’ safely
- Finding people that you are confident in their mental health to deal with questions that bring back traumatic experiences for them, or negative feelings
Strategy: Involving people who are no longer in a situation of vulnerability
- [When recruiting and involving people who have been victims of some kind of abuse] They were survivors of what had happened to them, so you telling everything is in retrospect in terms of experiences, not about a modern right up-to-date story. When there is potential for trauma that can be quite difficult
Other strategy: Working with organisation who already have close relationships with users and professionals who have the skills to engage with people safely
- Again the only way around it is by working with as many charity partners as possible
- [designing services for people in high risk of suicide], we couldn’t work with them. We had to work with professionals and practitioners to get their stories
- We just had to be really thoughtful about that process. The way we get around it is we partner with a lot of people [...] with organisations who already have these close relationships with people
- I partner up with people who have that outside relationship and use their skill sets to work with citizens. Which is great and quite a different thing for me. [...] I‘m sort of partnered with a brilliant talented person, who is able to take on board all of the responsibility of working well with citizens.
- We haven't reached the stage of working with citizens yet. During this research so far, I had to create the relationships with stakeholders to support me to engage with citizens’ safely
Accessibility reciprocity
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Challenge: Accessiblity of workshop activities
- There are massive challenges getting disabled people into a room, playing with post-it notes or whatever it happens to be. That is a big challenge
Challenge: Extractive of people's time & energy
- [having the user of the service on the team] then they would be given a fair value exchange for their time, we will share credit with them, we will share maintenance with them there after
- [user-research and codesign] can be quite often quite extractive of people’s experiences and time and energy
Strategy: Recruiting users into your team
- [through our regular user groups ] a handful of people became quite interested in the UX discipline and UCD approach. So there have been a handful of them who we recruited and joined the team as interns.
Strategy: Build up user skills
- They have also got involved in helping with transcribing some of our interviews and we also talked about getting some of them actually conducting interviews as well. So, I was doing some coaching [...], so they could start doing their own interviews themselves
- We run this programme to teach young people how to research and publish their own newspaper in response to like a question set by the local authority. Instead of doing extractive research, you were empowering them to go and do their own research, and turn it into a NewsPaper. So we would teach them the skills to do that. So we taught them how to do stakeholder mapping, interviewing their friends, and so all round it was a really kind of collaborative value model, cause young people got skills and employability skills, and something to show. We got paid to run the process cause we were doing the research, and we also paid young people, and they got answers to the question they wanted to find out. That is a less extractive model that involving people. It’s much more about co-development
Scalability
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Strategy for large scale involvment: Citizen science
- Citizen science is a kind of co-design where you get masses and masses, you have a massive sample pool of people giving you data. They are still codesigning with you because they're giving you insight into the right thing to design. As long as you test
Strategy for large scale involvment: Surveys
- With the current survey and engagement, we inform the design and delivery of the operational services. We‘ve received so far about 22,000 responses. It‘s quite massive, extremely large scale. So, one of the largest things I‘ve ever worked on. If people are saying “oh, I‘m concerned that [..]”, then we would take all of them and feed them to local [services]. So, that they then could improve what they are doing the following week. I feel like it‘s definitely changing in a way we remote designing with people
Uncertainty and stakeholder engagement
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Challenge: Not knowing the way
- it was too difficult for us to work out how we were going to make sure we could do a kind of design cycle with a wide variety of people, with a wide variety of ability in the room. [We] designed up to a certain point, and then we took it from that point to a wide range of people and a design step further, so we tried our best to ensure that they were involved in that process
Strategy: Experimenting, being honest about not knowing
- We tried a few things out, we experimented. [...] We said to the participants: we've never done this before, we don't know if this is going to work, tell us if it doesn't, tell us how it might, we'll see if we can change it on the fly and we will see what we learn. People were open for that because we were honest and they were very very helpful and supportive in terms of how we managed to deliver the research and conduct the activities
Challenge: Finding the right timing & gathering the right people around the table
- The blocker might be the timing, but also maybe the right stakeholders are not in the room in the first place or the project might be too complicated, there might be too many moving parts
Strategy: Inviting people to scratch out change things
- And invite people in to add comments. I try to stress that it‘s not finished. But that it‘s also not pressured, that it is ok for people to come in and to scratch things out or change wording or say that this has to happen before this bit. So actually, making things as movable as possible as well. So, I avoid printing things out until a much later date. I like to work on bits of moveable paper because I find it helps people feel that they can get involved in it.
Strategy for the lack of awareness of design language and tools: building design capacity
- We've sent myself and 5 different managers on a service design training to upskill, to lift the bar across [the organisation] in terms of the tools and methods that were available to everyone, the language that people like me were using, and make it more readily accessible. By doing that, [...] we were able to lift the kind of baseline. Designers like myself and [...] various people across the organisation could then work with people in a much easier way because they knew the language, they new the tools. You would still need to facilitate. You know the tools and methods, and workshops are not always the starting point. You need to do meticulous planning, and think who the right people are for each project before you start together. But the fact that everyone knows the language now and everyone knows why we are doing things, why service design or design thinking as an approach is going to be beneficial in the long run, I think it's a really good starting point. Sending managers on the training was really helpful
Gaps in being inclusive, accessible and ethical
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SD practice not open for everyone
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SD community being a privileged club
- It could feel like a members-only-club
- And being aware that we‘re so white and privileged that‘s just the service design community. So, who else is developing this? It almost seems like I’ve worked in a massive design bubble. And then I speak with people and they say yeah design is such a big bubble
Difficult getting your foot into service design
- I can see how it can feel difficult for people, who can see its value but not knowing where to start. I feel like that‘s a question that is asked quite a lot. Like how do I begin doing this? If I would start with one tool or if I would introduce this to my team, how would I go about doing that?
How we hire people
- I think we‘ve got work to do in terms of how we hire people for design positions. Our design groups and teams have a very similar look and background and level of privilege. So, I think we‘ve got work to do to diversify that. Especially people like myself, who are working in the public sector, need to produce services for our population, so we can do that best by including people within the teams, who are representatives of that population. And I don’t think we‘re quite doing that yet. So, that‘s another area I would like to work into
Lack of inclusivity in SD practice
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Who designs services?
- I think there are barriers in terms of how people perceive themselves to be a person, who designs services. And how that can be part of your role if not the whole of your role. I think that would be an exciting thing to explore
Bias, accessibility and social justice
- I am really interested in that complexity around bias and inequity, social justice in a service design space, and specially in the public and third sectors. And we don’t yet have the... at least not in the... like the SAtSD, doesn’t catch on that. Because it can’t, it’s not at that level of conversation yet
- Yeah that so flipping that around [what accessiblity bring to SD] probably the answer is: not enough? but where I would like to be doing more, where I would like to see an opportunity is for more of that thinking around diverse needs, trying to encourage and support and understanding what the experience of disabled people and people with health conditions is, so what's their lived experience and how do you ensure that this is considered as part of your design process even if you can't get them into the room
SD practice needs to become more inclusive and diverse
- Yes we need [service design] skills, but going back to my point, you should have lots of different people in the team. And you know, service design, I don’t find it as inclusive to like user research sometimes. They should be intermingled in with everything
- What about booking a holiday, someone who uses a screen reader, can they do that? what do you mean? Can a colleague who uses a screen reader book a holiday? oh I don't know I haven't a clue... hmm ok fine, so why are we not thinking about those kinds of things as well? Now to be fair, we are [thinking about it] to an extent, but whether or not we have the knowledge in the right places is a different matter
Activities and workshops not accessible
- There are massive challenges getting disabled people into a room, playing with post it notes or whatever it happens to be, that is a big challenge, so yeah, being able to provide answers and support and understanding to help that, to ease that, that's where I would see I can make a difference
Involving the right people
- Where it‘s in fact, we know that those are the interesting people, the ones that do try out and do a bit of it while still doing their full-time job which is like answering the phones to citizens. They are the people, that are going to know what the service needs to be
Missing a set of principle s for inclusive design
- We would need to somewhere say: these are our principles of inclusive design, this is what we mean when we are saying inclusive design. And there are a variety of principles and models around inclusive design on the intra-web, in many cases, it's probably not a case of writing from scratch, more like grabbing one, sticking a saltire on it and saying this is how we think about inclusive design. We might adapt it slightly, but there is something in there that we need to talk about. Now inclusive design, there are lots of ways to think about that, I know that [...] is kind of involved in projects which are looking at inclusive methodologies, and there is a bit of high level piece on inclusive design but it's just how are articulating that and how clear it is, what were doing in that place. I don't know that we are doing that great yet
- Inclusive design, designing in an inclusive manner. I think the challenge with that is that we haven't got a define model on how we are doing that or how we might approach that, everybody is winging it, now all the service designers I know are fine at that , they think about diverse needs, they think about it in diverse ways and they're open to trying out new things and that's exactly what you need but in terms of a kind of consistent... a set of principles around service design we don't necessarily articulate it that well, or pull that together in a way that all the designers might be thinking or pulling in the same direction
Missing discussion around ethics in SD
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What are the inequities we are creating?
- There is a lot of talk about Design Thinking being the master's tool. It's been created by certain people for certain people really. What is it that we are hard coding by replicating some kind of practice for example? What are the inequities that we are creating and reinforcing in the things that we are designing because we haven't thought about the origins of it or we haven't thought about our own team bias? These conversations can be directly applied even though they are not about a technical development. Because these ideas have come from somewhere, and we are using them. So what is in this thing that I'm using that was developed by these people that might be excluding these people and how can I modify that to be more accessible, to be more inclusive?
- The Design Justice Network is a global network looking at social justice within design, and how designers can be aware of the decisions that they are making especially around reinforcing power structure or inequity.
Need to up-skill service designers to be more critical
- There’s a huge upskilling need across the community to really think critically about the processes and to be aware of.... You know, we talk about designing for good and there is this kind of real optimistic positive energy around changing the world. And that is really positive, but it needs to be grounded in reality
How we involve a community
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Giving ownership to the communities
- We've got a community empowerment act, and I think it is that thing. I was at a community council for a project, and I asked the question: "who gets to keep the bits and pieces once it's don?", and they said, "oh, you know, it's 'the plan', so that would be the council?". So that's my thing. Community should be the client, and I think the resource to get that. I think the power corrupts the thing. When you see the rhetoric on the health side as well, there is lots of stories on how the lack of control on one's life is the greatest issue, so.. it's a long game, I think patience is the key, patience and persistence as I used to say to folks, you know, community is not going away, communities will shift and change, the new generation is more open minded to things, its more about management structure, easing that power. There is an opportunity to really make a leap rather than incremental
Capacity building of communities
- The community retains a lot of that information, that research as well. So they can then use it to build an understanding of their place and what they want to do. There is a lack of that. It seems to be held by others, and you need to make either an FOI request, you never know who to ask, or it's in different spaces. So I think now a common good knowledge bank for core information that will help the community, if they want to do something they can tap into that, and use that information, even if it's just a contact base or just previous stuff, it's your starting point to sort of build on
SD parachuting into communities
- It just seemed very weighted on the side of the design team and the organisation that was commissioning the research or the design; and that is still a huge gap. I don't know of any team - and especially public services - where there are a lot of discussions going on about the inclusivity or not of what we do. Because of the way we do it and the way we approach communities and citizens, the way we organise these relationships - where we should have been nurturing relationships with people this whole time, we haven't been. So what does it feel like to parachute in XYZ communities and do your cute research workshop? So these conversations were not happening, it was so obvious to me when I got in the SD space. I don't know that I would have that experience in previous roles that are community based or even more community led or more participatory. That still a huge thing for me
Think they don't need to talk to people
- Assuming that you know stuff and don't need to talk to people, which I know, is the opposite of service design ethos but I do think that occasionally you come across people that may be are kind of comfortable with skipping over the user part of things
Barriers: organisational culture, mindset and environement
These clusters of insights are related to Working with people but not only, they could also fit the theme ‘SD work and contributions’ or ‘Scottish Approach to Service Design (SAtSD)’
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List of clusters of insights : Service Design is new and unfamiliar
People want the magic of Service Design but don’t want the change that comes with it
Change requires investment
- I think also Service Design and public service has a long way to go, it will require huge organisational change across a lot of public services, and across a lot of public bodies actually, not just public services. And that requires a lot of money, and these agencies do not have those pockets, their pockets are not deep enough. So while you can make lots of suggestions about how you might re-orient the organisation, it is not always possible that those things can happen. So that is a big challenge
It’s threatening people
People's fear of change
- Fear from front-line and mid-management staff. It tends to be a thing, but that’s not the same for everybody. Because some people get really excited about the opportunity to actually involve and redesign what’s around them. And I really try to make sure that we try and do like the kind of communication and co-design cycles with the staff, the teams. But I definitely found that individuals can be a real barrier there because they are scared of change, they’ve seen it before, it failed last time. Organisational memory is really strong. Often people in local authorities have been in the same job and will never leave in their whole life, you know, it’s one of the lasting bastions of career singularity that you can get
- There is something about just change, if this is a change that's difficult and that needs leading, especially when you ask people to do things like discovery and testing, if they have never done things like that before, and I think the resource against that feel too overwhelming
Design is evidence based, decision-making and is threatening to other professions
A new mindset
Resistance to doing things differently
- For the most part, people are quite open to something different. Sometimes, the clients are really onboard and they know it's going to be different. Sometimes, you have other people who maybe had not decided to bring you in, and are bit more like "oh, why are we doing this like this?" For the most part, people are positive about you being there, but sometimes you can get a bit of resistance to doing things differently
There are a hundred barriers
- There’s about a hundred answers to that question
True participatory service design would challenge existing structures and jobs
- Last time I've checked, public services in Scotland are the biggest employers, so you have all these people who - if you had strong participatory service design in - a lot of jobs would be called into question and a lot of services would be called into question either they need to reshape quite a lot or they need to go.[...] people can't feel good in that position in a public service. I think about that a lot
A new way of thinking people are not used to
- These are new ways of working for lots of traditional and bureaucratic organisations
- The barrier is that the [organisation] has not done this ever before, and there isn’t an awareness. So for example, the whole attitude, the whole way of thinking. So for example [during] safety training, and part of it is looking at software and trying to discover safety issues. And there was something around ‘oh there’s this monitor that beeps if there is this specific thing wrong with the patient, what’s the clinical safety things that you need to pay attention to’. So there was things like: Human error, staff error - top of the list, always top of the list - and and the story goes ‘a not so senior nurse may misread the thing’ and, obviously as a designer sitting among clinique technicians my question was: what’s the font size on that monitor? What is the contrast? This isn’t even service design so never mind this nurse actually having enough time to go and read this thing, and why is she going in to read it, and then copying it on a piece of paper that then she carries somewhere else in the first place? You know, that's not even think about the actual service level. But basically, the organisation’s thinking was very very clear, ‘oh, staff error. We need more training. And so to get people from that attitude to, ‘wait a second, can we look at the error of the service or even the product you’ve got plunked here that makes no sense - it’s really hard work. I think stories from patients or even designing with-- or even nurses, even staff, would be really helpful. But we are a long way off of even acknowledging that that’s where the problem is
Using the traditional method ot start a Service Design approach
- It’s been interesting to see how to take something from a really traditional engagement and insight type of work - this might be a public survey - to illustrate in a way that maybe fits into a user journey and takes other research insights into account. Pushing it forward to let’s produce those insights and action points for senior leadership
List of clusters of insights : Current ways of working is blocking service design
Decisions and hierachies
Slow to act on insights
- Present the insights to various boards to just tell them that they need not invest making this happen. And it took them maybe another six months to stop the project officially for them, the citizens, solicitors and basically for anyone. Quite interesting and I‘m very proud that they stopped it because that‘s one thing, they don’t admit to mistakes very easily
Not understanding how decisions been made
- There’s lots, right, like in any corporate situation - and by corporate I mean any large, complex organisation. There’s many constraints, there’s many different people who have positions of power that dictate what needs to happen and when. In my experience a lot of the challenges are organisationally and culturally influencing things, that people understand why decisions are being made
Organisational hierachies
- It’s really difficult. 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
How to act upon a decision?
- The way I am starting to see it is that this minister has done the design. They know what they want, it’s there, there is a brief, you can go and build it. That is an interesting one to me. How do we still do service design around decisions that have already been made? And how do we sell that it is still necessary? It is exhausting
Not admitting mistakes
How things are currently done
Resigning and just accepting that‘s the way it is
- They‘re kind of aware of each other. But it‘s almost this sign of resignation because it‘s so big. It‘s just impossible to coordinate. We kind of feel this with us as well. My colleague describes it as pushing open doors. Why don’t we try to coordinate this a bit and unify it? And everyone says “yeah, yeah, sounds like a great idea but don‘t know how to do it”. And that is kind of the attitude how most people think. So, no one tries because everyone is kind of resigned thinking that‘s just the way how it is
Not doing the right thing because the work is mandated (by the government)
- I also think, particularly with the public sector, sometimes goals change quite regularly, and the reason to do something is not always because it's the right thing to do, it might be the right thing to do, but quite often things get done because it's mandated. So it's quite a culture shift that is still to properly take hold
Talking instead of doing
- But sometimes in Scotland it just feels like those conversations are just conversations for years and it‘s quite annoying because people dying
Solution-driven approach vs problem-driven
- There’s all these sorts of reputation risks, cause quite often the things that people have been asked to do are solution-orientated not problem-solving
Clients want to start building things before having a shared vision
- [Some want to develop code before establishing things like a ] shared vision of what that website is for. What it‘s going to achieve. What is the user going to need to do on it? What's the business need? All that stuff isn’t there
Last updated: 01 Jul 2023