Two NZ Service Designers take on SDGC Dublin 2018

Matt McCallum and Margaret Fraser were fortunate enough to attend SDGC 2018 in Dublin. And we were fortunate enough that they were prepared to share their highlights with us :)

SDGC 2018 have shared the presentations, videos and photo gallery from Dublin. This is Matt + Margaret's highlights slides, along with notes from their session held with SDN New Zealand in November:

  • Service Design is less obvious – less about the shiny things and more about the glue that keeps it all together
  • We have good tools for storytelling (e.g. blueprints, mapping), but need to make sure they don’t become a distraction – they need to be something that can be implemented
  • Uscreates do “live” service design on their BBC Radio show - recently focusing on bullying in schools and parents being left behind by technology
  • Used to articulate all the hidden steps in the process
  • Key sponsor was Cork County Council - they used design thinking to understand their staff perceptions of how the community (residents and business) viewed their work, as well as designing better services
  • Staff valuing the service less than those using the service :) (see slides)
  • Every service you are designing is using other people’s data – how do you design for that data? E.g. do we need to get this data? What are we going to do with it?
  • Challenge the notion that more data is better
  • Like that challenged me to think about the tech side of things – not just the “people” side
  • What’s the big expensive things we’re doing that we don’t understand? :)
  • Some snippets from Lorna Ross of Fjord’s opening address:
  • Digital transformation needs humanising “technology changes fast, people do not”
  • We spend more time understanding the future of tech than the future of people [Ben’s note: totally agree!]
  • Civilising innovation – current focus is on teaching humans to understand technology, however the future is to teach technology to understand us
  • The robots are already here! Our challenge as designers is to find opportunities for how we can better collaborate with robots
  • “Cobots concept” = supporting humans, not replacing them
  • “The Pinball Game” = good non-threatening way to do “lessons learnt”

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