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Workshop 1: Exploring contributions and challenges

Angela F. Orviz

Serena Nüsing

Stéphanie Krus

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The Miro board for the workshop at the start

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What motivates us as designers?

the role itself
creativity & inspiration
help and enable people learning
problem solving
making the world better

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Mapping our contributions

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Mapping your work and contributions along two axes

Things very important to us / less important (vertical)

Things that we do most of the time / rarely (horizontal).

All sticky notes were bright blue initially and coming from the research insights (participants could add to it if they felt something was missing).

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Mapping your work and contributions along two axes

The same activity like “facilitating workshop’ appeared in very different quadrants, so in that case, we changed the colour of the note (to red for this one) to make divergence of opinion more obvious.

A lot of notes are not blue anymore, so what we do and what we feel is important varies a lot from one practitioner to another. Which is not surprising depending on where you work.

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Mapping your work and contributions along two axes

Good news:

We seem to be doing things that are important to us a most of time (this is the busiest quadrant).

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Things very important to us that we do most of the time

aligning project team
doing research and presenting results
identifying patterns, simplifying systems
taking every opportunity to ask for feedback
advocating for design
bringing an evidence -based perspective
integrating with other things

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Looking closer at our contributions

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How we feel we contribute

We have insights describing the things we think we contribute as service designers to a problem, a project, a team, or an organisation.

However, not every contribution might be recognised by other people.

How can we make our contributions understandable, visible and tangible to people?

Participants added ideas in the columns for: Mind, Eye and Hand

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How we make it understandable (Mind)

use plain English, no jargon, terms relevant to the audience
apply it to the work in they do, work with the staff for them to do the design work
understand what the real problem to solve is

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How to make it visible to people (Eye)

work in the open, show the process
lots of diagrams
get senior people to observe user testing sessions
reports to show the cost of a service before and after re-design

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How to make it tangible for people (Hand)

tell stories
show the results
always relate back to their world, the things they do

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Challenges

Result of the work in the breakout rooms on the 3 themes chosen by the participants

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A choice of activities for the challenges

Look at the insights we have and expand with your own insights and/or vote which ones you want to discuss next

Think about the roots of those problems and an ideal situation to address the challenge

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Challenge 1: Gaps in design practice

Root causes: understand what people need, not what they want — and need to enable users
Challenges: Giving ownership to the community and building capacity of the communities
What would make it easier: co-production, putting people together to connect

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Challenge 2: Organisational barriers, maturity and legacies

Comments added to the insights or insights highlighted were:

we’re pushing Service Design in a broken system
solution driven approach vs problem-driven
organisations don’t have the resources to bring in contractors
lack of time to step away from the day job to consider working differently
trust
language can be a problem, talk about ideas and values

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Challenge 3: Awareness, expectations and communication

Root causes: ‘Digital by default’, thinking that service design is only digital, the senior people trump card
Challenges: Involving senior people from the start and throughout, getting people to understand that digital is not always the appropriate solution, linking with internal change in the organisation.
What would make it easier: Work with senior people, make them understand the process and the outcomes and how to use them. Involved them in User Research and the design process. Work with all parts of the organisation not just the Digital department. Work with the senior leaders to enable organisation wide change.

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Thank you to all participants!

We had up to 14 people at some point.

4 of them were happy to be mentioned here:

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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 or via email: practitionerstories@gmail.com

Angela (on Twitter)
Serena (on LinkedIn)
Stéphanie (on Twitter)
Practitioners Stories (on Twitter)