Lots of feedback and ideas thanks to a busy week
Last week was busy and insightful! We ran our first workshop with the service design community and made our first participation to the Service Design Scotland Gathering as guests and co-creators.
Both events allowed us to get some feedback from the community. Thanks to this, we have lots of ideas and renewed energy to take the next steps.
Context
Last year we collected stories of service design from the public and third sectors in Scotland. We‘ve interviewed and discussed with 15 practitioners in Scotland how to better support, grow and build up the service design community in Scotland. You can find more about our project in our previous Medium post.
Feedback from the interviewees
Just before Christmas, we gave the opportunity to the participants to review their quotes before making them public. They had told us two main things that we’ve heard again last week:
- It’s impressive and so much work! but it’s hard to interact with and to know where to start
- Reading some quotes, you recognise the same challenges, pain and ideas in other practitioners
1st Workshop — Exploring service design contributions and challenges
Last Tuesday, we facilitated our first workshop discussing the insights from the interviews around service design contribution and challenges. With this workshop — as with the whole project — we were experimenting and trying new things out. It was an opportunity for us to engage with the service design community on the material we had gathered and to get feedback and new ideas on how to move on.
We had put a lot of thought in this workshop. Even though we had focussed on only one of the five themes, there were still a lot of insights to go through. This made the workshop preparation harder but also made it difficult for us and the participants to fully explore all of the insights and activities within the two-hours workshop.
Things we‘ve done
- Discussing what motivates as (service) designers
- Mapping (service) design tasks and their impact
- Exploring how to make the value of service design more tangible and visible to people
- Discussing some of the biggest service design challenges and how to overcome them
Thanks to all the participants
We‘ve learned a lot about the topic of service design contributions and challenges but also about how to improve future workshops and how we share our research.
Up to 14 people from the service design community in Scotland had joined us. Four of them were happy to be mentioned here: Jean Ferguson, Lorri Smyth, Nicola Cooper and Nicola Dobiecka
If you would like to learn more about the workshop
You can:
- see the work on the day as a PDF here
- look at the Miro board for it (open for comments)
- or go through the slides below for a summary
Service Design Gathering as guests co-creators
Last week, we also had the great opportunity to be guest co-creators of the Service Design Scotland Distanced Gathering organised and moderated by Mike Press, Barbara Mertlova and Lorri Smyth. For those not familiar with this meet-up and the regular gatherings, you can see the outputs of all the previous sessions here.
Being a guest co-creator means we had the chance to talk for eight minutes about our project and to prepare questions for the breakout rooms before and after our guest slot. Get in touch with Mike, Barbara or Lorri if you would like to do it.
1st Question we’ve discussed in groups during the breakout rooms
What makes you feel part of a Service Design Community?
In some groups, people agreed they felt part of this community:
“There is always someone willing to help, regardless of how big or small your question is. You feel supported.” — Report from one room
“Services designers want to help people — so they will help people get involved in the community regardless of their credentials.” — One participant
“Everyone being on similar pages, having the need to create social change, a sense of involvement” — Report from another room
Service Design is kind of unknown at times, it’s interesting because “it’s like cleaning, you only really notice when it’s not done” ! — A participant
In other groups, people didn’t get to answering the question and instead tried to define what service design is. This echoes other discussions at the start of the event where a user researcher for example didn’t think they were part of the service design practice.
“ We also had a discussion about what service design is, and where it does or doesn’t start and stop — we felt that service design isn’t ‘pure’, it really overlaps into so many different areas” — Report from one of the rooms
Even though we did say you didn’t need the title of service designer to take part in our 1st workshop, some people were not sure they could contribute.
So there is some work to do in this area to be more inclusive and open.
2nd Question discussed in groups during the breakout rooms
How would you like to interact with the data? And what do you think you could do with it? — 2nd question
A number of people suggested using alternative formats like animations, videos with voice narration, short blog posts, infographics, as well as audio and prints as an alternative to screen time.
Other people recommend to make the data more accessible by having bitesize pieces of it, in a format that would suit non (service) designers.
“Appreciated the value of having the ‘raw’ data in the Miro board but also having condensed information to be able to show non-SD people, as well as users & designers”
“Broken down into smaller chunks — bitesize pieces. Stories in different formats (audio/printed, something as an alternative to screen time)”
We also had to learn that we need to better explain the purpose of this work:
“I think I missed it when you were talking about the project, and maybe I’m missing something — but I’m not sure from looking at the Miro/Website I know what it is this data is from or for?” — one participant
Holding workshops was also suggested as a way to disseminate our research results:
“How did the workshop go comes to mind as looks like it could be an evolution on how you disseminate” — one participant
Thanks to all the participants and to Mike, Barbara, Lorri and Hazel for the opportunity and suggestions.
Onboarding more people
A few people got in touch to get involved and help. This is great as it’s obvious we can’t do everything and we were hoping that this work would be used by others. We’re looking forward to seeing how we can best involve them depending on what they would like to do to contribute.
Please get in touch if you’re interested too!
Get in touch
You can get in touch with us individually on Slack (‘Service Design in Scotland’ or the ‘Public Sector Design in Scotland’), on Twitter or LinkedIn, here in the comments or via email: practitionerstories@gmail.com
- Angela (on Twitter)
- Serena (on LinkedIn)
- Stéphanie (on Twitter)
- Practitioners Stories (on Twitter)
