How to start a service design community

Here are my notes from today’s cross-gov service design call. Thanks to Martin for inviting me along and letting me ask lots of questions.

How to start a service design community

Marie and Tom at DWP gave some tips on how to grow your own service design community. Warning: this will create demand for service design.

  • Extend the invite beyond user-centred design roles
  • Include policy makers, business architects and business analysts
  • Find allies to help
  • Try an "intro to service design" workshop
  • Start lunch time meet-ups
  • Start user-centred design show and tells (designers, researchers, performance analysts)
  • Allow people to join remotely, use quick and easy tools like Google Meet
  • Spread the word using offline channels too (for example; posters in the kitchen)

Marie has written about building up the service design community in DWP.

Why to start doing service design

Sanjay talked about how the digital service standard is changing to become the service standard.

service designers help organisations design services that work end-to-end, front to back and across every channel

How to do service design

The hard bit. You need service designers. But it's not just work for one person. Everyone helps to design services. Try to structure the whole organisation around users. A key theme that keeps coming up when I talk to people about design recently is:

zoom in and zoom out – you need to consider the details and the big picture.

Next steps

  • Go to a service design conference (like Service Experience Camp)
  • Create a business case to hire service designers (in the open)
  • Go to the next cross-gov service design meet-up (maybe host it in South Wales)