 If you'd like to know how you can scale service design in a sustainable way and how the role of service designers is changing, keep watching because these are the topics I'm going to discuss with a guest of this episode. Hi, I'm Louise and this is the Service Design Show. Hi guys, my name is Mark Fontijn and welcome to a brand new episode of the Service Design Show. This show is all about helping you to create more human-centered businesses. And the way we do it is by studying the success of some of the world's best service designers. On the show we talk about topics ranging from design thinking and creative leadership to organizational change and customer experience. If these are the topics you're interested in, be sure to know that we bring a brand new episode every two weeks on Thursday. So if you don't want to miss anything, click that subscribe button. My guest in this episode is Louise Down. Louise is the director of design within the UK government. And for the next 30 minutes or so, Louise and I will be talking about these two topics. How do we scale service design in a sustainable way and why do we need to rethink the role of a service designer? If you want to fast forward to one of these topics, check out the episode guide down below in the description or just stick around and enjoy the whole episode. And in case you prefer to listen to a podcast version of this episode, head over to servicedesignshow.com slash podcast where you'll find this episode and other previous ones. For now, let's jump right in. Welcome to the show, Louise. Hi. So happy to have you on this evening in Utrecht or, yeah, it's evening in London. You're based in London, right? I am, yeah, in sunny white chapel. You can see it. Louise, the first question I ask everyone that comes on to the show is do you recall your very first encounter with service design? I do, yeah. I probably had a similarly revelationary moment to a lot of people who kind of moved into the practice from doing something else. I was a producer at the Take Gallery and my job was essentially making the in-gallery interpretation materials so, you know, kind of mobile tours, videos, things stuck on the wall to help people to understand artworks at the Take Gallery. And one day I was going to the gallery to test a new audio tour that I had just made. It was one of the first ones that you could just download onto your phone and just simple videos on an HTML site so it was really accessible. I'm really excited about this kind of new way of providing a mobile tour and then you walked into the gallery to find a big sticker on the outside of the gallery saying, please don't use your mobile phones. I sort of thought to myself, this is insane. How can we not be designing all of these things at once? There must be some form of design where you design everything at the same time rather than one thing separately to another thing and then start googling a thought I invented service design because I was like, I'm sure there's designing something as a service and then, you know, kind of that's where it started and I moved into services line from there. So this must have been back in 2004, something like that? Earlier? When was that? Yeah, something like that, yeah. A long time ago. Well, in the early days of service design, that's nice. Louise, we have two topics that we will talk about in the next 25 minutes and super interesting topics. We'll be co-creating the questions as we go along. So, yeah, the main question is, are you ready? I am ready. All right. Let me pick the first topic and I've got it over here. And this topic is called Sustainable Scaling. Can you make a question related to this? So I suppose my question related to this is, I guess, a sort of how might we kind of question because it's something that I think potentially as an organization who has been working on the service design here in the UK government but also as an industry is something we're starting to find is an issue that we need to think about and that's how do we go beyond purely trying to kind of get people to believe that service design is an important thing to actually scale in that across a very large organization and actually making that sustainable over time so that we're not just designing the service once but the service is repeatedly designed and iterated live and in the open. That's a holy grail. Yeah, absolutely. I've heard a lot of people talking about what it means for services to be growing up and I think we're definitely in that space here in government and I think it's an interesting topic for probably the industry to kind of think and talk about a little bit as well. So yeah, what are your findings so far? What isn't and is working related to scaling service design? So I think one of the things that we realized very early on in terms of scaling service design was that as an organization GDS is at the very heart of government so we're part of the Cabinet Office which is an organization that essentially helps government to design and deliver better services. So we realized about a year ago that actually the right approach to scaling better services was government wasn't to put a full agile team on every single service from GDS but that our approach should be to enable the rest of government to design and deliver better services. So we've taken a number of different kind of tax to that one of which being massively trying to increase the number of service designers in government so we've gone from something like 50 and two years ago to over 800 service designers and interaction designers and graphic designers across government and ten heads of design in different departments across government so we've seen massive growth in that time which has been brilliant but one of the things that comes from massive growth is then having to share standards and patterns and ways of working so we then sort of have kind of taken our focus from that and obviously we're still focused on building that community but to supporting that community to work on shared patterns so we have been building a design system which is a kind of based on some prototype versions that we've had running for a very long time that shared patterns that will help people to be able to contribute to the way that designs should be kind of implemented in services so if one person in one department comes up with one way of asking a question about sex and gender that another service team in the department of government are able to use that pattern and put it into their service very easily because that service that pattern itself rather is fully coded so it's just an element they can add to their service and focusing on also a way of those patterns being iterated as well by their community because the last thing we want to do as the GDS design team is to stipulate what standards people work on when actually we're not as close to services as everyone else is so we've been putting a lot of effort into making sure that those that design system is easy to contribute to as it is easy to consume the patterns in that product Super interesting because I think there aren't that many standards related to service design and services in general the question that came up to my mind related to scaling is what you hear often is when agencies scale it's really hard to keep the culture of the agency Is that an issue that you see happening? So scaling from how many, 50 to 800 How do you make sure that people share the same core beliefs, same values? So one of the things actually we did very early on when GDS was first founded five years ago was to create the design principles so that's a set of principles I think it's now been translated into 30 different languages there are many governments across the world using those principles and the first one of those principles says start with user needs and that has, those things have really formed a foundation on which a culture has kind of been built and people, you know, I kind of like to ask people in interviews whether or not they're okay working on a black and white website because ultimately government UK and the services that are on there are not, you know, the most visually interesting things in the world and neither should they be I find that designers don't join government to work on, you know, kind of beautiful creative things they join to solve problems so they're already part of a group of people who feel very dedicated to a movement and feel very dedicated to public service so there's an existing culture around public service that is already in the civil service now anyway but we do an awful lot of things to make sure that culture of the design team stays strong we have regular meetups every eight weeks where we get guest speakers in and we get people to show their work we've also got a mailing list that's got something like 4,000 people on at the moment so more than just those 800 designers there's more people interested in design there are people who are actually designers which is great and that has, you know, kind of daily questions of people, you know, kind of saying I'm designing a service that is, you know, kind of looking to help people to, you know, kind of come to the UK and stay, has anyone had any experience on working with people who are migrating to a new place and people will start sharing their experience around those things so a lot of the tech that we use is very old school in terms of kind of sharing so it's things like meetups and mailing lists but they work because we can never predict the types of technology that people are using in civil service because it's so big so, yeah, we certainly put a lot of effort into making that community feel as if it's a strong community that people want to be part of Yeah, and I think there's the key and I'm really interested to learn more about that because what I see a lot with people creating patterns or standards is that, you know, you put up a website or you document something and it's one-off effort and it's really hard to keep that alive and to make sure that people use that, right? You contribute upfront and then nobody uses it you document it really well and then nobody uses it How do we go about solving that issue? Yeah, well, so we have a number of different controls to make sure that services actually are consistent across government so GDS has control of spending in IT across government, we also have control over what services get added to Goddard UK so in order to go on to Goddard UK, a service must show that it's using design patterns it's actually intrinsically baited into the way that stuff is published and things are worked on, but more than that, I think there's as I was saying, the culture of the designers who join government don't join to, you know, kind of make amazingly kind of sort of personally creative decisions about what colour a service should be they join to solve a problem so actually when it comes to the use of patterns most people want to use those patterns because they would rather spend their time solving a really important problem than figuring out a new way to do a radio checkbox because it's already been figured out and no one needs to or needs to all want to do that more than once So the selection of the people working in your agency is the key to success, right? Yeah, absolutely, I like to think of it as a kind of mixture between kind of idealism and pragmatism you know, people have to be idealistic about what it is they want to achieve and making services better for users but they have to be pragmatic about how they get there and I think that that kind of brings true for the majority of the 800 people working in design across government is that we wouldn't be here unless we wanted to do something really radical to make the lives of users better but you don't go into government with any kind of probably false sense of the fact that you know that's not going to be a slow process potentially and be difficult and for all the right reasons that government is very risk averse because it has to look after people it doesn't mean that it's quite difficult place to work sometimes for designers so I think it's a temperament of people who join that kind of work in that way So sort of wrapping up this topic what kind of challenges do you foresee related to scaling in the next two, three years? So I think one of the biggest challenges that we have actually is just the pure scale of the task actually so there are about 4,000 services across the UK central government we're actually the oldest and largest service provider in the UK and there are 500,000 people working in civil service so we are 3,000 people in total doing user research, designing content about 0.5% of the civil service so we're very, very simple in comparison to kind of where we need to be and what we're seeing is actually that there aren't enough people in universities or who want to move into service design at the moment to bring us up to the scale that we need to be so we're doing an awful lot of work with universities and much, much earlier with schools to encourage people to get into service design and particularly designing the public sector because we just simply can't kind of work with the current kind of group of people who are out there equally we have real problems finding people with the right type of skills and I'll maybe talk about that in the next kind of section but the service design market doesn't have the type of skills that we're looking for most of the time but I think equally on the flip side of it not just scale sustainability is a really big issue as well and so it means that our service designers have to think about how the things that they make get implemented so all of our designers can code it's really important that if they're working on something that goes on the internet that they understand how the internet works it's a bit like being a carpenter if you didn't understand how wood worked then you would be in trouble so for a service designer who's working on digital things you have to know how digital works so we're finding that kind of dealing with sustainability dealing with something that rather than trying to design the future designing things that can be designed in the future is actually a task that means that we need to get into very detailed conversations about how technically things work so we need people who don't have an aversion to getting their hands dirty and talking about code and about data and other things Interesting, let's use your opening and move on to the second topic because you said something about people having the right skills and that you require maybe different skills than are typically asked for in the market so the second topic we can talk about is called the role and again, can you formulate a question around this one? So, good question, asking a question around that so my question would be is the current understanding in the service design industry of what a service designer does fit for purpose and fit for the future of what service design is and becoming So let's really find what a service designer is Let's go Right, let's do it now I sort of touched on that a little bit earlier but service design in government is a very embedded practice so our designers are working in multi-disciplinary agile teams they work with developers, user researchers, delivery managers product managers to really just understand what a service should be to write down into the implementation of that thing and how that thing works, how that thing is operated and run in a sustainable way What I've found is that the history of service design is very much a kind of agency-based role and I certainly know this from having come from agencies a lot of what you're taught and encouraged to kind of hone in terms of your practice in an agency is actually your skills of facilitation and of presentation and making really nice diagrams and slide decks to prove your point and with us, actually we don't need to do a vast majority of that because we're working with an embedded team that's already brought in I'm not saying there isn't a fair bit of facilitation that goes on with more complicated contentious decisions and that diagramming isn't occasionally important but we need our service designers to actually be able to design a service and one thing I find actually quite frightening is that when I talk to people in interviews about service design and I ask them, what is a service? What do you think service design is? I get an hour's worth of response and to me and to government a service is something that helps someone to do something and service design is the design of services and unless someone can understand that and can be able to actually physically design a service then I can't employ them as a service designer and that's a real problem for us because as I said we're dealing with massive scale here we need people with those skills and yet universities are not seemingly teaching those skills their perception of industry is still very much based on the skills that are needed by agencies agencies themselves when designers go from university to an agency environment their skills get completely warped into the type of thing that an agency needs and we're actually just finding that after 5-10 years of working in an agency a designer just isn't able to change their mindset and actually think, well maybe I should learn to code so it's the delivery actual delivery of what you've designed delivery is part of the design process right? Completely and it should be and it comes back to that point about sustainability because unless we're building unless we're designing at the core face of delivery in the long term we're going to design services now and then in 5 years time find that those things are as failing as they are now because we haven't iterated them over time and that's actually iteration is the real test of a good design that lasts not how well it performed when it first came out so we need designers that can work with developers that aren't afraid of getting into the details but also we need people who are very critical and understand that actually their role as a designer is often as an ambassador for users and if technology asks the question of what can be done and design often asks the question of what should be done and unfortunately practical delivery skills and criticality are both things that are not either encouraged by the agency world or encouraged by universities unfortunately at the moment so hence a lot of our service designers are not from a design background we have a lot of artists we have a lot of people from social sciences they moved into design in their later careers but they weren't initially taught in design I think that's potentially a real testament to where design education needs to go in the future to support I think an increasing industry where service design is moving in-house because it's very difficult to perform the type of improvements to a service that you need to when you're in an agency you don't have actually the access to change processes to change stuff that's the challenge I think a lot of agencies face that they get to the point where they get the conceptualization of a service and then there is a really big gap how to follow up on that and you don't have that gap no and I don't think that gap should exist and in a way I used to work for agency before I was brought into government to kind of build service design as a thing and part of the reason why I was keen to leave was because I was in the same situation as most people in agencies I had spent the last six years basically creating PowerPoint decks to make people in executive positions look good and I looked back on my career and couldn't point to one single thing that I could concretely say had been delivered and it's both really dissatisfying as a designer because I think all designers have a slightly God complex we want to see our things living in the world but it's also not an effective industry if that is the product of what we're doing so what do you think would have to change in order to change this so I think we all want to make impact we all want to change the world for the better Yeah, obviously I would say this but I would say getting more designers in-house so I think there's a perception potentially amongst designers who work in agencies that you're not going to get to work on the variety of stuff that you do in the agency world that potentially it might be slower various other kind of rumors which I think maybe were true probably eight or so years ago definitely not true now I mean there's no bigger variety of types of things to work on than government, everything from bin collections to social housing to land management and animals take your pick and I think there needs to be a real growth in terms of the industry as a whole actually acknowledging that my role as head of service design for government is not as a client to agencies it's as a person who runs their own internal design organisation I think there's still a real perception and I suppose slightly looking down on people who work in-house by people who work in agencies and I think if I'm perfectly honest I think their days are numbered and I think we're going to start seeing more and more designers I hope move into organisations and move right to the kind of coal face of delivery and actually start kind of delivering on some of the promises that service design has always promised Super interesting and what I see happening or at least what I'm getting from your story and I recognise this from our own practice here so often it's still like there's an agency and there's a client instead of what in my opinion should be a partnership so an agency supporting something that is already happening on the client's side I think that's a much healthier situation but for that you need clients that are more mature and that have their own in-house capabilities right and I think also you need agencies that are more mature as well I mean I think it's a little bit like the well in Britain there's a kind of analogy that a dentist always have the worst teeth because and I think it's the same for service design agencies always are the worst designed in terms of the service they provide to their clients and I can count the numbers of service design agencies that have ever done any user research with their clients on one hand I think it's a very rare thing to do and actually we've often been in a situation where we need extra people and we need them very quickly to work on very certain kind of things at that point yes we do need to work with an agency but I've been in situations where I'm having a conversation with that agency and someone's telling me that it needs to take six months to do and they need a ten person team and that ten person team are not going to work in my office and they're going to work in a completely different way to the way that we always work you know and I think there's a real upping of the game that agencies need to do to actually treat themselves as they would the projects they work on and actually go you know what are the user needs of my service that I provide as an agency so Super interesting I always have a question and or at least I always give my guests the opportunity to ask a question to the people who are listening or watching these episodes is there a thing you'd like to ask them I would be interested to know if potentially people have the same prediction about the service design industry kind of moving or in-house and it's true I mean it's certainly kind of true from my anecdotal kind of experience of looking at other large organizations but I think I'd ask that question and I would ask the people analyze their own practice and their own skills and start to think about if that is the case what is it that they need to start doing in order to be able to kind of work in those sorts of environments what is it that if they're running a design education organization what is it they need to start teaching and to really start analyzing that and to kind of really now at a point in the maturity of the service design industry to start really looking at our practice and thinking about the next phase of it rather than potentially where 10 years ago which was really just making the case for service design to happen with a point of scale and sustainability and delivery and that means a whole set of skills so I think maybe it's not quite a question but it's more just a sort of ask to kind of go in and think about what they're doing and whether or not they're doing what they need in order to be able to kind of meet that next phase of service design I think this new way for scaling service design is what makes this field so interesting because 10 years ago we were like sort of inventing what was happening and how we should communicate this and what it is we actually do now we have a whole sort of new challenges and for me that's what makes this field so interesting Yeah absolutely and I think what's really interesting is actually that I've seen in the last three years suddenly in government is actually the conversation has moved on from my having to convince people that service design is important to almost having to kind of do the opposite of saying well yes it's designing the services is of course the right way of doing it and having service designers working on it is the right thing to do but that isn't going to change overnight and it will take time and the service design is not a silver bullet that you can just apply the service design and then suddenly things will be better and I think that's a conversation that needs to be had about actually what are the differences of service design so that we don't become in a way potentially what Agile in some places has become which is a kind of people have a sort of methodology fatigue before Agile there was Prince 2 I'm sure there were a billion other things and what we don't want is service design to become the new methodology that promised the world and delivered nothing and I think part of that is actually focusing on actual delivery rather than on methodology for service designs and this refers back to the guest who was on the previous episode Hartmut Esslinger who said that the problem with design thinking and service design is often that there are no consequences when results are not delivered and that is a real big task and challenge we should take upon ourselves as an industry yeah completely I mean look at any other industry if they just didn't deliver the things that they said they were going to deliver then it's not good enough for us to be satisfied with doing a 2 day workshop or just doing a research you know and I fully agree with you on that yeah and you know I think you can really tell when you look at service design conferences how many people are actually showing real results and statistics of you know like this change from this to this versus the number of people who show the process and some diagrams and I just I don't think that's good enough I don't think it's good enough personally for those people to accept that of themselves I don't think it's good enough for design conferences to keep promoting that type of work and I certainly don't think it's good enough for universities to start teaching people or keep teaching people that that is good enough but there's a real gap in our knowledge I think is a practice on what service design as a delivery based practice actually looks like I mean certainly something we've been doing for the last two years but where is the shared knowledge around people who are also doing that in other organizations we might do a separate episode on that sounds super at the delivery based practice right that's what you called it yeah yeah absolutely Louise thanks for your time thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and ideas about where service design is heading it was really for me it was really valuable good yeah I enjoyed it thank you very much so what is your biggest takeaway from this episode share your thoughts and ideas down below in the comments and remember more people like you are watching these episodes and your comment might just be the thing that helps someone to achieve his next meaningful breakthrough if you're interested in learning more check out some of the past episodes or head over to learn.servicedesignshow.com where you'll find courses by leading service design experts that dig deeper into the topics we talk about on the show I'll see you in two weeks time with a brand new episode thanks for watching and see you then