In 2015, Tom Loosemore asked if anyone had written a blog post about how “most of government is mostly service design most of the time”. I couldn’t find one, so I wrote it myself. Thanks in large part to a link from the awesome UK government design principles, that post has been viewed more than … Continue reading Mostly service design: the health and care edition
A couple of conversations recently made me realise I should write this down. Jane tweeted: "Public Sector Digital peeps, what is now the best definition of a ‘Service’ for people not used to working in our world? The end-to-end journey which enables a user to ‘do a thing’ - am sure many have put it … Continue reading What I mean when I talk about service
Mick Ward is sick of people trying to sell him electric woks. As chief officer leading transformation and innovation for social care in Leeds, he sees a never-ending procession of providers claiming to solve enduring human problems with expensive, complicated, isolated, digital solutions. Mick believes we'd do better to start with people and their communities, … Continue reading Electric woks or eating together? Time for human-centred designers to care about the community
Doteveryone CEO Rachel Coldicutt’s Medium post, ‘What if tech conferences don’t matter that much?’ landed just as we were wrapping up Leeds GovJam 2017. Here's me posing awkwardly with the awesome volunteer team who made this year's event happen... Every one of these people could, and should, stand on a platform and drop pearls of wisdom to an … Continue reading Now that’s what I call doing not talking
“In Elizabethan amphitheatres, like the 1599 Globe Theatre, performances took place in ‘shared light’. Under such conditions, actors and audiences would be able to see each other... This attention to a key original playing condition of Shakespeare's theatre enables the actors to play 'with' rather than 'to' or 'at' audiences. Actors therefore develop their ability … Continue reading In shared light: why making thing visible makes things better
Yeah, we're user-centred! Who are the people most present when our service is delivered? Where are they, physically and emotionally, at that moment? What could each of them put into our service, and what could they get out of it? What are we doing to better answer questions 1 to 3 this week? How are those people taking … Continue reading So we think we’re a user-centred, agile team…
Without exception, everyone I meet in the public sector wants to help make their service better. Most of them are in some way frustrated. The domain is massive and the activities disjointed. People engaged in any given service - from users and frontline workers down to managers and policymakers - can go for months on end … Continue reading Most of government is mostly service design most of the time. Discuss.
There's never been a more exciting time to be designing services in the public sector. But it can still be a lonely existence - in any organisation, a small number of advocates may find themselves trying to shift a large mass with plenty of inertia. The Service Design in Government conference that I attended last week has an … Continue reading 90% archaeology: my notes and reflections on Service Design in Government 2015
I first wrote this as a comment on Joel Bailey's excellent blog post titled 'This thing called agile might kill us all' but thought it worth re-hashing and expanding here. For context, Joel writes about "working for a big high street bank. The brief is to redesign the ‘end to end mortgage experience’. The timescale is to reach … Continue reading The Last Target Operating Model You’ll Ever Need™
On Friday, a group of us spent a couple of hours chewing over the question of wellbeing; specifically wellbeing in a smart city; more specifically still wellbeing in a smart city that happens to be coterminous with the Metropolitan Borough of Leeds. We were talking about this stuff thanks to Tim Straughan and the "Smart Cities – … Continue reading On wellbeing in a smart city: when I hear the word dashboard…
"Boy in the bubble" David Vetter passed his life in a sterile enclosure breathing purified air and touched only with plastic gloves. While his parents and doctors attempted to make his life as normal as possible, they lived in fear of the tiniest exposure to common impurities and infections. He died aged 12 in 1984, after a bone marrow transplant given in … Continue reading Real work only begins when we break out of our bubble
Over the years I've worked with digital services in different spaces, from sports performance to house buying to students on campus and training in the workplace. And there's this one picture that resurfaces in service after service. I need to get it out of my head and into the world, where I hope others will help me develop … Continue reading Seeing over the next hill – a service design pattern
Three days in the spectacular Derbyshire countryside with a bunch of clever, skillful doing and making people. Lots to digest, but for now here's what I found in my notebook this morning..."simple single purpose things"learn > sell > make > record > learn >source > scale > repeatthe circus printerArtefact cards + iPad + Gorillapod + projector"do the … Continue reading Some things I wrote down at Laptops and Looms
I've been thinking about this exchange with Roberta... @mattedgar Lots of people _talk_ about getting users in the room. This weekend @mHealthLeeds is actually doing it. #mhleeds @RobertaWedge @mattedgar Users of what? In a health-care context, the term covers layers of euphemism. @mattedgar @RobertaWedge fair point. Alternatives to the word 'user' gratefully received. (Often but not always "people" … Continue reading Not All Mammals! In defence of designing for “people”
A lightning talk at Service Design in Government... There’s a growing interest in hacks and jam events in the public sector. Over the past months in Leeds alone, we’ve seen events around open government data, mental health, cycling and public transport. Great stuff can happen at these events, yet they can also be unfulfilling for participants … Continue reading How I learned to stop worrying and love the jam
Matt Edgar writes here 