Caroline Jarrett and Jane Reid wrap up #SDinGov 2018 with an overview of some of the conference highlights. Service Design in Government ran from 7-9 March, 2018, at the John McIntyre Conference Centre in Edinburgh
2. Caroline Jarrett @cjforms Jane Reid @janereid73
#SDinGOV love for @rufflemuffin
Image credit: https://wearesnook.com/author/sarah/
3. Caroline Jarrett @cjforms Jane Reid @janereid73
We’re looking for diversity
Caroline Jane
English with Guyanese childhood Scottish as Scottish as Scottish
25+ years as freelance 25+ weeks as freelance
Not working (until this week) Working
Advising teams Working within teams
4. Caroline Jarrett @cjforms Jane Reid @janereid73
We’re looking for similarity
Caroline Jane
Service designer and …. Service designer and .…
Not 35 any more Not 35 any more
Qual by nature, quant is useful Qual by nature, quant is useful
#oneteamgov #oneteamgov
5. Find someone you haven’t talked to yet
• Find one way in which you’re diverse
• Find one way in which you’re similar
6. Caroline Jarrett @cjforms Jane Reid @janereid73
We come to meet our tribe
• 250 people from 22 countries
• All interested in service design in government
• Find and share our joint experiences
7. Caroline Jarrett @cjforms Jane Reid @janereid73
We come to change our minds
• If we’re not challenged ….
• If we don’t learn something new ….
• If there’s nothing unexpected …
Why are we here?
8. Caroline Jarrett @cjforms Jane Reid @janereid73
Caroline’s two key aims
1. Find out what’s been happening in the last year
2. Follow the money
Image credit: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-33585087
9. Caroline Jarrett @cjforms Jane Reid @janereid73
Jane’s two key aims
1. Are we still working in silos
to try and solve the age old
problems?
2. We often hear the phrase
“everyone’s a service
designer”. If that’s true, how
can we make best use of
the great people turning up
to work in the public sector
every day?
Suggested intro music: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t5DVhoel7AA&app=desktop
(The Red Hot Chilli Pipers cover Avicii's Wake Me Up)
Thanks again to Sarah Drummond, @rufflemuffin, for doing last year’s Endnote on her own when Caroline couldn’t come to the conference due to her husband’s medical problems
Caroline being a great designer of question sent me a set to answer in preparation for co-presenting, then we had a call to prepare our answers as she’s just pointed out we’ve many differences and but we also have similarities.
Here’s a few: Caroline’s a service designer and everything else to boot, and whilst I’m working in service design I’m a user researcher through and through; we’re both not 35 anymore (thanks for reminding me of that Caroline).
Qual by nature, quant is useful, what does that mean? We talked about the different methodologies we both use and I think on the quant front I replied something along the lines of “I can’t count to save myself but totally get the value of and how to use quant data in my work, so like Janet said in her opening talk yesterday my go to person in the team is the resident analyst to give them data in a format that I can work with”.
Oneteamgov – we’re both inspired by the movement of people working together to make a difference and for one reason or another we’ve not made a meeting but that doesn’t matter. We’re there living and breathing examples of its principles, they work in the open too so it’s easy to join in from a distance.
Mhairi Black was the youngest member of the House of Commons when she was elected at age 20. In her maiden speech in the House, she pointed out that she was the only 20-year-old who gets her housing paid for by the government. If 20-year-olds can’t get housing benefit (unless they are MPs), are we doing enough to justify the money that gets spent on us and our service design intiatives?
Bill Nye is saying: "If we think together and work together, good things are going to happen"
So much great stuff going, it’s hard to know where to start to report back:
– using creativity to understand mental health in young people,
the issues facing our most vulnerable users on a daily basis doing simple tasks that most of us take for granted like washing and dressing,
hearing how we make it so hard for people who’ve made personal sacrifices to go to war for their country
our veterans and service designers using playmobil to communicate complex topics like death to the cross government work going on to make things better for users.
A great start to the event and so many inspiring sessions to choose as well as all the buzz about the great stuff going about working in the open, sharing, and the benefits to be reaped from that.
The word on the SD street was that it was refreshing to hear raw honesty from DWP on the challenges facing the redesign of health benefits to the extent it really touched people - it was the topic of conversation right into the evening.
Another topic was getting ideas from our international friends on how they improved services for veterans.
Day 2 – the day started off with a reminder that the time is now, stakes are high and that we can’t afford to get this wrong, each and every one of us is needed to help remove blockers.
We heard through sessions like service communities about progress being made to solve problems that cut across departmental boundaries.
More great sessions and key messages on the value of working together. Sharing through communities came out really strongly: team work, breaking silos and in the session on AI by BJSS we were reminded that human-needs will not go away.
One of the other words on everyone’s lips is policy: how can it be more user-centred, can opportunities for improving it be factored in the exciting new prospect of service patterns - one of the many sessions with so many provocations thrown in to the mix.
Will Harmer of GDS talked about getting people from several departments together to create united content around the topic ‘Start and Run a Business’.
Ellen Care and Anne-Louise Clark, London Borough of Bexley shared a powerful session on the lessons they learned when working on service design
Caroline enjoyed learning about what’s new and what has stayed the same. Matt Jukes talked about working in the open, and encouraged us all to ‘Publish, not send’. He also came up with this gem about ‘Astrology for management… what’s that thing… you know’ and an audience member accurately guessed that he meant Myers Briggs
David Burgess talked about working with vehicle inspectors, the people who do inspections for the DVLA of giant lorries. When the inspectors were asked about what device they wanted, they thought that an iPad mini sounded good. But David’s team listened, and then listened again by going to get the inspectors to try devices in the actual massive inspection sheds. When the inspectors were climbing up and down ladders into inspection pits, the device that actually worked best was the comparatively small iPhone 7 in a bright yellow case.
The workshop led by Ignacia Orellana and Kay Dale, GDS, was a splendid example of really encouraging conversation amongst our community and listening to each other. It was a genuine workshop, with great discussions at each table and the organisers both encouraging us to discuss, and making sure they took copious notes of the discussions.
We came away with plenty of ideas about how to apply what’s going on now to our plans for the future. For example, Ian Roddis picked out ideas from Tim Paul’s session on the GDS design system.
Caroline hoped to learn about how we are cost-justifying the work that we do. Although we heard some challenges from the keynote speakers about money and measurement, it seemed that few sessions really looked at costs, how money is spent, or any savings achieved.
Jane was particularly surprised and delighted to meet so many people from the health profession.
“And I don’t mean designers working in digital. These were real doctors who’ve taken time out to come up from London, community nurses. A year or two ago we’d never have seen this. In fact I remember trying to recruit doctors to take part in really important user research and they turned out to be one of the hardest to reach groups - this was the biggest surprise for me”
We challenged the audience to think about what they’d learned, the impact (“so what”), and how they’d use it in future (“now what?)
We encouraged everyone to join in with a short mixture of Scottish Highland dancing and Pakistani Bhangra dancing
https://twitter.com/nickeagland/status/970165945359507457