SERVICE DESIGN


Barely a year old but already a small team of UX designers and researchers within Scottish Government is in big demand


Service Design - and why everyone’s talking about it


BY KEVIN O’SULLIVAN


“We have had a lot of interest, the emails are near constant,” says Dr Dhruv Sharma, who takes time out of his busy schedule to speak to me. “We are a team of around 10 and we’re handling all kinds of inquiries. We get things like, ‘Can you find me a service designer?’ to ‘Is there a standard service designer job description?’ and ‘Can you come and help us on a project?’ We’re having to do a lot of prioritisation work right now.” Sharma is User Research Lead within the Office of the Chief Designer at Te Scottish Government. He has been part of a small unit of service design and user researchers that have formed the backbone of a team which, despite its small size, is starting to wield enormous influence over the way government designs its services. Led by Cat Macaulay – the Chief Designer Officer – who has MS herself, and who Sharma says is a public speaker who makes audiences “feel uncom- fortable” (in a good way, as she challenges people to think). Service design is not a new


concept and there have always been people whose jobs are based on building a deeper understand- ing of the way a service – be it private, public or third sector


– works, or often fails to work. But there is an argument to be made that service design in now an orthodoxy that is spreading, almost virally, across government and beyond. To put it into context of the


Office of the Chief Designer was launched in August last year and yet within that relatively short time, more than 200 people from various parts of the public sector have attended its workshops and training sessions. Tere are now over a hundred ‘service design champions’ across diverse parts of government – both central and local – who are embedding the principles from the ‘Scottish Ap- proach to Service Design’, which have been outlined in a 26-page playbook, within their own practice of delivering services. So what is that approach, and what is uniquely ‘Scottish’ about it, I ask? “I think the way we look at it


is to try and think about how we co-produce the process of service design itself,” says Sharma. “Rather than have a bunch of user researchers asking some questions and then feeding that back to service designers, we try and involve both from the outset. So it’s much more based on co-production throughout. And we also want to make it easier for the organisations to have the


30 | FUTURESCOT | AUTUMN 2019


skills; we’re not going to train up a service designer in three days, but the playbook is a great place to start when looking for those kind of answers. I like to think of it as a mindset, but it also has a clear set of hands-on tools and methods that people can use. And those resources will hopefully create the capacity and conditions for change. We want to enable, empower and engage people in that process.”


Organisationally, the unit, which sits within the Scottish Govern- ment’s Digital Directorate, is split into three distinct parts under Macaulay’s leadership, based on Design (service design, content design and user research), Acces- sibility and Digital Participation. Most of the team are located at Te Scottish Government build- ing in Victoria Quay, in Leith, with some of the digital participa- tion team members situated in Glasgow; there is also a separate piece of work around digital eth- ics, which is informing the way


the unit develops. And there is no doubt it is growing. “We’ve been running service design meetups, which have gone from around 20- 25 to something like 47. I think a lot of it is because service design is inherently disruptive, and that generates interest.” Sharma was one of the speakers


at Digital Justice & Policing – a FutureScot conference – at at Te Sheraton Hotel in Edinburgh on October 29; he presented the Scottish Government’s approach, sharing a platform with Amanda Smith, Head of User Centred Policy Design at the Ministry of Justice, and Kate Wallace, Chief Executive of Victim Support Scotland, which is in the early stages of bringing service design principles into the way victims are treated by the criminal justice system in Scotland. Sharma’s presentation was insightful, and showed how a service design approach often exposes the way multiple services overlap between people who use them, whose lives can be ‘messy and complicated’.


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