Learning together in Aberdeenshire
By: Mike Press
Tags: Scotland, Design Thinking, Training, Service Design

Written by Hazel White and Mike Press

We are currently midway through an intensive Service Design Training Academy that we are running with Aberdeenshire Council. This post is an opportunity to reflect on our first two days in terms of what we have learned and how we can build on this when we return for the final two days. In summary — Council and third sector staff, service users and ourselves all learned from the process, and from each other. In the spirit of working in the open, we summarise our key learnings here.

This four day (2 x 2 days) Training Academy introduces the principles, tools and methods of a service design approach — putting people at the heart of how we work. Participants gain hands-on experience of applying user-centred problem solving skills in an engaging and enjoyable way. Working with the Council team who brought us in to help build service design capacity, we identified two themes that our 25 participants can choose to focus on:

How might we provide housing that meets the needs of everyone, fairly, including those needing emergency housing? How might we work better with partners in the third sector?

Based in a community social club in Inverurie, we have so far focused on issues such as observational research, user interviews, empathy and journey mapping.

Kindness, empathy and working in the open

The Scottish Government’s National Performance Framework puts kindness and working openly right at the centre of how it expects public services to perform. This helps to anchor the relevance of service design, and in the case of this training academy it connected especially with participants.

Kindness provides an opening to empathy, which leads to an exploration of the practical steps service design provides in ensuring that empathy with service users informs the change process. Of all the training sessions we’ve held, we probably focused on kindness more in this one. This provided many benefits, suggesting that we could offer even more of an opportunity to discuss how kindness relates to the specific questions we are exploring.

The value of going outside

When we can, we build observational research into our training academies. Our design walkabouts take a variety of forms, but in all cases strengthen people’s abilities to listen, empathise and understand human behaviour, see experience as it is actually happening, and from this to draw insights that can be applied strategically.

We sent people out to visit different cafes in Inverurie and to analyse the service provide purely through observation. We make use of three different types of design walkabouts — Walk + Look (a problem finding exercise), Walkthrough (a task focused exercise based on experiencing a service), Walk + Talk (gathering user views in situ). Design walkabouts not only exercise observational research skills, but help group dynamics and provide additional texture to the workshop experience.

Service users and providers learning together

Rich deep learning arises from bringing both service users and providers together and making the training process transparent. A number of service users were part of the training academy and took part in the sessions on user interviews.

While participants were keen to learn how to create and develop ideas that they could take some ownership of, service users clearly wanted their involvement to be equally involved in training and research from the outset. We therefore created opportunities for exchange and sharing, which will continue into the second phase of the training.

Liberating Structures

Work with another client led us to explore alternative approaches to decision making in organisations that are more consistent with principles of collective leadership. We asked twitter what folk recommended, and Giulia Merlo, Service Design Lead at Cancer Research UK, suggested that we should look at Liberating Structures.

The Aberdeenshire Training Academy was our first opportunity to discover how Liberating Structures can integrate with design-led approaches. It clearly resulted in more engaging and inclusive discussions around objectives and reflections on process, and we look forward to trying out further Liberating Strategies in our next two-day session.

So what we learned from our two days working with Aberdeenshire Council staff and service users was this: