A weeknote, starting Monday 4 Mar 2019
By: Paul Moran
Tags: Weeknotes, Government, Design, Service Design

One of the most interesting things in my week was the Cross-government Service Design meetup held in Sheffield so that’s the main focus of this note.

Poster showing the title of the meetup I went to this week. It was the seventh cross-government service design meetup and the theme was designing for context

It was the first time I’ve been able to meet up with fellow service designers from other departments and it was a good opportunity to hear about some of the great work they’re doing under the theme of designing for context. Thanks to Martin Jordan and team for organising it.

It was also an opportunity to put real life faces to some of the people I only know so far from twitter.

One of the things I picked up early in the session is that context is dynamic and can change how the same person interacts with the same service in the same channel. An exercise run by Ben Carpenter highlighted some universal barriers people face:

Time

Money

Access

Interface and interaction skills

Self confidence

Awareness

Comprehension skills

Emotional state

Trust

Evidence

Enthusiasm

It was great that he was willing to share his emerging thinking on this and explore it with a willing group. I’m looking forward to see where this work goes next.

We also had two talks, one about designing for prisoners and prison service staff, the other about a discovery project relating to the replacement/redevelopment of a key law enforcement system. Big respect to those who do a similar job to me but in much more challenging situations.

Gemma Barnes, Marc Kendrick and Eddie Shannon shared their challenges and some of the impactful design they’re developing in prisons. They’re doing some important work which will have a real impact for the people they’re designing for.

Photo of a screen showing the title slide of a presentation called Designing for prisons

The second talk also featured some great illustrations by Chris Taylor which I enjoyed as someone who spent last year following through on a resolution to devote more time to drawing.

Screen showing a slide from a presentation with an illustration of a man holding a letter from the police

I enjoyed hearing from Amy Everett about how the research had been done. This included how spending extended periods of time with research participants helped get past the point where they are on their best behaviour and showing what they think should be done (and what they think you want to see) and to a point where they revert to more usual behaviour which begins to reveal where the challenges and opportunities for improvement actually lie.

Other stuff this week

Preparing to run a lightning decision jam next Monday with our wider team as a way to inject some momentum into our collective response to our employee engagement survey results

Got some more stakeholder buy-in to using service blueprints to help us understand our services in a more joined-up way, and identifying ways to use them as engagement tools with a wider pool of senior stakeholders

Did some thinking about content for a presentation I’ve committed to next month at a breakfast tech meetup in Nottingham

Amy Hupe

Looking forward to next week