Fully funded places available
Supported by Data Skills for Work at The Data Lab through the Tay Cities Deal Digital Skills Project, funded by the Scottish Government.
Bringing service design principles into project management can improve outcomes and lead to happy stakeholders. It offers project managers a toolkit that supports effective delivery. By focusing on user needs, experience, and value delivery, service design gives project managers the opportunity to create effective solutions with users.
Service Design Academy helps to give project managers the framework, tools and skills to face the complex challenges of managing scope, resources and stakeholders’ expectations.
Here’s just some of the ways service design capability can help:
Solving problems
Projects are all about solving problems and service design methodology can turbo-boost problem-solving skills. Learning about user research, journey mapping, prototyping, and testing can help project managers better understand complex challenges, explore innovative solutions, and make more informed decisions throughout the project lifecycle.
Getting closer to users
Service design is all about understanding and empathising with the people who use your services. Bringing these needs into every stage of a project can be confident that the final product or service meets what people need and expect.
Holistic view
The entire service experience is looked at, considering all touchpoints and interactions between users and the service. Project managers benefit from this approach by identifying potential gaps or opportunities for improvement across the entire project lifecycle, leading to more integrated solutions.
Collaboration
Service design always encourages collaboration and interdisciplinary teamwork. Project managers can enjoy taking this collaborative approach to facilitate better communication and co-operation among team members from different teams, leading to more cohesive project execution and outcomes.
Iterative and agile
Service design asks for an iterative and agile mindset; continuous learning, adaptation, and improvement. Project managers can apply this mindset to project management practices, helping to respond to changing requirements and stakeholders’ feedback ultimately enhancing project agility and resilience.
Buy-in
Stakeholders are involved in co-design activities meaning that project managers can use participatory approaches to build stronger relationships with stakeholders, and give them a sense of ownership and commitment.
Value
Service design creates value for everyone, aligning project goals with user needs and business. Project managers can give the assurance that projects will deliver value and impact, ultimately contributing to growth and sustainability.
Service Design Academy L-R Kim Anderson, Connor Finlayson, Maralyn Boyle & Caryn Gibson
If you’d like to find out more about how Service Design Academy can build service design capability to help your business get to where it needs to be please get in touch info@sda.ac.uk or go to our website https://www.sda.ac.uk/newsroom/
What does a good experience look like for the people you work with? The Service Design Academy can help you challenge your assumptions by understanding what matters most for a purpose-led and motivated team.
11 and 18 June
10:00 – 16:00
Online and Interactive
Find out more here
When people are happy at their work, good things happen in that business.
James Timpson, CEO of the high street and online home services company Timpson’s Group, talks about “Upside Down Management” . Business success comes down to two things: the satisfaction of its staff, and what it gives back to society.
James Timpson – Picture Credit: The Times
People vs Employee Experience
It’s important to think about how you frame good employee experience. At the Service Design Academy, we like to focus on “people” rather than “employee” experience.
We believe that this subtle change in language can have a positive impact on mindset when creating these experiences. Breaking down the hierarchical assumptions around the word “employee” allows everyone who works with an organisation to be seen as a unique person – whatever they do and however they do it.
Taking a service design approach offers the perfect way to improve people experience because it will always involve people front and centre.
Led by Service Design Academy educator Kim Anderson, our Design Your People Experience course will give you and your colleagues the mindset, and tools to build your new people experience plan.
Find out more here
Book Your Early Bird (£595 before 30 April) place now
If you are interested in this course being customised for a group of 8 or more colleagues, please email our Business Manager Maralyn Boyle m.boyle@dundeeandangus.ac.uk
If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Specialist service designers have a critical role to play in the development and improvement of services with large organisations. Their jobs are challenging and often clearly defined in terms of role and function
Their focus is on improving and optimising the end-to-end experience of a service. They research user needs, collaborate with stakeholders, and use design thinking to create human-focused solutions. Through prototyping and testing, they refine and make service delivery better for users.
However, many of the organisations Service Design Academy works with simply do not have the luxury of being able to resource a full team of professional service designers. However, they recognise there is a need to build capacity, skills and knowledge to drive change and transform services to meet users’ evolving needs.
The ideal for these organisations is for an emerging community of non-specialist and committed individuals with service design skills and confidence. A community that understands that by taking this approach they’ll be equipped to adapt to change, evolving customer needs, and emerging market trends.
Why does it matter?
Creating a community within an organisation, where individuals and teams are aware of service design, leads to improved collaboration, a customer-focussed culture, and better problem-solving across different teams and departments.
In our experience of working with diverse organisations across different sectors there are some important reasons for not having one person or even a team responsible for service design. There needs to be a community.
What does a community look like?
A Shared Understanding
A community of individuals aware of service design principles establishes a shared language and understanding across different teams. This common ground helps in effective communication and alignment of goals. We learned a lot about shared language when we worked with The Centre of Civic Innovation Glasgow City Council
A Collaborative Culture
Service design often requires input from various departments. Building a community ensures that individuals from different teams have the space and empowerment to bring a 360 degrees approach to service delivery. We’ve enjoyed partnering with Edinburgh Napier University Information Services Directorate as their PMO makes amazing progress.
Breaking Down Silos
Service design can suffer in environments with departmental silos. A lack of big-picture thinking stifles creativity and leads to duplication and frustration. Creating a community encourages the breaking down of these silos, promoting collaboration, information sharing, and a more integrated approach to problem-solving.
Always keeping the customer in mind
The customer must be everyone’s concern. A community that is collectively aware of service design principles helps maintain a consistent customer focus across various teams. This alignment is crucial for delivering a seamless and positive customer experience.
Bit by bit - iterative improvement
A community will be geared for generating and sharing continuous feedback loops, allowing for regular evaluations and refinements of services based on insights from different perspectives.
Problem-Solving
When individuals across various teams are aware of service design principles, problem-solving becomes easier. The collective knowledge allows for a quicker identification and resolution of issues that may arise in service delivery. We loved working with ANGUSalive frontline staff with a customised “What’s your problem and how to solve it” programme.
Better People Experience
Having this conducive environment helps to provide a platform for employees to actively contribute to the improvement of services, creating a sense of ownership and pride in their work. Manchester City Council HR and OD had a clear vision of building service design capability to improve their people experience on our customised programme.
Facing Change together
A community that understands service design principles will lead to resilient mindsets – better equipped to adapt to changes, evolving customer needs, and emerging market trends.
If you recognise that service design is needed not just for you but for a wider group, we’d love to talk. We’ll find out more about your challenges and goals and you will learn what Service Design Academy programme meets your needs. info@sda.ac.uk
“A whole new way of doing things”
Data and service design work together closely. Data analysis and insights inform service design decisions around people – their behaviour, preferences, and needs.
At the same time service design can be used to design processes that capture relevant user information to improve products, services and experiences. Learning more about how data and design work together means that we can understand the relationship between information about people (data) and insights (the things we can learn).
Thanks to support from our partners Tay Cities Digital Skills and the Data Lab, the Service Design Academy at Dundee and Angus College was delighted to welcome 25 people working in data roles to a 14 hour live and online Service Design for Data Professionals course over four mornings in November.
Learners joined from a wide range of roles and functions including Data Analysts, Insight Analyst, Human Resources, Organisational Development and Improvement, Library Systems, Employability, Workforce Development, Policy and Programme management.
In our pre-training support survey, we discovered a variety of reasons learners had for wanting to learn more about service design:
– Developing new techniques to research and develop data analytics
– Problem solving in a project environment
– To have some tools and structure to use in the future will be very useful and help my audience understand the data better
Everyone shared the goal of wanting to learn how service design can help them to solve problems with (not just for) stakeholders.
The course was designed to help data professionals communicate and effectively engage people in the story and context of data, helping their organisations to make data-informed decisions.
Service design training helped them think through issues and problems and develop techniques and confidence to undertake user research, analyse and synthesise qualitative data, generate ideas, and create prototypes for testing and communication.
Kim Anderson, lead educator on this course shares what happened over the 4 mornings.
“Using the double diamond and its phases Discover, Define, Develop and Deliver the group were introduced to service design through a blend of theory and practical activities.
Working on a relatable challenge – the Future of Food – the group first gathered thoughts and experiences to then work in seven self-selected themes.
These themes covered diverse topics from Policy and Regulation to Education and Human Rights. To challenge their initial assumptions, learners made user research plans and learned interview techniques. We then showed the teams how to analyse and synthesise data. From there they worked on problem definition and then to generate ideas before prioritising, prototyping, testing, and iterating their ideas.
We love working with enthusiastic learners, and this first cohort of the service design for data professionals course didn’t disappoint. Each person gave it their all every week which created a fun, and supportive learning environment.
The group left with reflections on what they liked and what they had learned, and we’ve taken that feedback to update our next course running from the Friday 8th March.
Service Design Academy is passionate about offering a hands-on experience of service design as an approach to understand the issues and needs of people to collaboratively problem-solve. We hope a key outcome for our learners will be a shift in mindset; that working in a data role is seen as a service that supports many others within and outside their organisation. We look forward to hearing how the participants continue to use service design in their role.
We are incredibly grateful to Digitay and The Data Lab for giving Service Design Academy the opportunity to be part of a fantastic programme which will contribute to building new skills and opportunities for people in Tay Cities.”
Service Design for Data Professionals will run again four mornings 09.30 – 13.00 from 8th – 29th March with fully funded places for people living or working in Tay Cities available meeting the eligibility criteria.
We highly encourage those living or working in Dundee, Angus, Perth & Kinross and North Fife to take advantage of this valuable opportunity and apply for a funded opportunity to upskill.
For more information about Service Design Academy please contact Maralyn Boyle
01382 448868
Leigh Watson
Senior Education Officer – Curriculum Design
Education Scotland
Leigh works for Education Scotland as a Senior Education Officer in Education Scotland’s Curriculum Innovation team and is committed to ensuring education meets the needs of Scotland’s learners. Leigh graduated with a Professional Development Award in Service Design (PDA) in 2023.
Leigh shares her story of how the PDA was a gamechanger for her work in curriculum innovation.
My service design journey begins
I had an awareness of Service Design through the Scottish Approach to Service Design and had used this approach in my previous role as Education Manager in a local authority. When I joined the Curriculum Design team in 2022 I felt it made sense to explore it on a deeper level. Part of my role would be about supporting and shifting mindsets to drive change and improvement rather than a more traditional knowledge exchange model of support so it made sense to explore evidenced based learning to support me in doing that.
My first experience of Service Design Academy was with a 2-day introductory course I attended with other colleagues. Although it was online and remote delivery, I felt like I was “in the room” and liked the way it was delivered, it kept me engaged and involved. I was delighted when the PDA was offered as an opportunity to me to do some deeper learning and also to develop my skillset when facilitating work with education partners.
Before I joined the PDA, I had the obvious concerns about balancing full-time work with study. A number of colleagues in the team had previously completed the PDA so I was reassured that because I could apply the assessments to real work based problems I would be blending my learning into my day job.
In the Learning Labs
When I started the course, I quickly realised there was so much to learn, and I made the effort to read suggested texts and review content. In the learning labs, going through live tasks with colleagues from different organisations was so interesting. If you are learning with people from the same background, like education, you end up talking about the same matters. It was so refreshing to be working with colleagues from across the world and from different sectors.
The interactions with the tutors were superb. They had nice clear delivery, the resources offered were a good support and easily accessible and the flow was well-paced. It also helped they have a good sense of humour too.
The balance of learning labs, doing work back in your own place and having online sessions as worked well and I found it a nice balance between lab and self-directed learning.
Assessments
Assessments? Yes, they can be a pain, but I’m sure that’s the same for anyone doing a qualification while working. Because the content was so relevant to my work and helped with live projects, they were worthwhile.
Taking the SDA team’s advice, my Tools and Methods, User Research and Co-design unit assessments were based on discrete pieces of work to demonstrate learning in these areas.
My final project culminated in a huge piece of work to support the Interdisciplinary Learning Co-design Group. This national group of educators is currently researching and developing support for education reform through the lens of interdisciplinary and project based learning approaches. There’s a great deal of interest in this work: the group has over 150 colleagues coming from across the education landscape – schools, local authorities, universities, colleges, early years, Community Learning Development and Education Scotland.
Through my project unit I facilitated the group to do all the exploration work needed to define work streams. Three subgroups are now set up and the project is now in its second iteration. These three work streams will deliver outcomes on professional learning, on shifting culture and practice, on the pedagogy for Interdisciplinary learning, but also looking at project based learning for secondary school learners.
We are evolving the model through Knowing, Doing and Leading and are now in the developing phase of the design process. This continues to be a iterative process in response to the needs of the wider education context.
The support that I was offered outside of the PDA online classroom made a valued contribution to my final project. Any time I had a question, an SDA colleague gave me a quick call and we’d talk something through, giving me examples of where to find resources.
Impact of the Professional Development Award
Without the deeper knowledge and understanding of the service design process, (being a PE teacher at heart, that’s not part of what I would learned in my core pedagogical practice), the shift to the user centric element of design was a key outcome of doing the PDA.
The impact for my practice in education innovation is that I constantly ask “what would the learner say?” Not only from a hypothetical response, but really asking them in authentic ways. There has been a real shift in my mindset. The education arena has its own language, so I have had to lose assumptions that everyone understands ‘eduspeak’. The PDA really helps you think about how to communicate with people outside of education.
I’ve found my skills in co-design support many elements of my role in the Curriculum Innovation Team including partnership working where I’ve supported how to reduce siloed working, lose duplication of effort and activate cross organisation teams. As a team who have almost all completed the PDA, we not only have the potential to support our external education partners, but we use this as part of our core practice. This has helped to improve efficiencies in work and better connected thinking using a range of perspectives.
As part of a significant piece of work across five different local authorities, I facilitate curriculum design workshops in different localities. I make sure that what is being done fits with the co-designers’ priorities by having deep discussions in advance. In workshops, it’s made me much more responsive to their needs and to follow and support the direction co-designers are taking.
The PDA has helped me realise I’m working on two levels – creating the right conditions for people to co-design through my facilitation and this also supports the design of Scotland’s curriculum into the future.
Advice for new PDA students
Protect times in your diary so you can be at all the live learning labs. You’ve got people there to practise design challenges with you and you also get a chance to work with people with different expertise and refreshing perspectives in a safe space. You’ll come out of your bubble to look through a collective lens with other learners, before you apply your learning in your work context. Be prepared for the challenge of managing your workload, and above all else enjoy learning how to do things differently.
Make 2024 the year when you have the skills and confidence to drive change, solve problems and innovate.
Here’s a rundown of what you could be learning!
Our flagship SQA accredited course
Professional Development Award in Service Design
Our PDA takes place in four parts over six months. All classes are live, interactive, and online, supported by a wealth of online course material.
Find out more and book:
You will:
- Learn to use the fundamental tools and methods of service design.
- Apply your learning in your own professional practice.
- Build user research skills to help you identify user needs.
- Explore how you can involve people throughout the design process using co-design.
- Create a portfolio from four small-scale work-based projects to evidence your development skills and knowledge.
- Drive innovation through the empowerment of others
- Generate ideas to prototype and test before they become solutions.
Fantastic course if you are interested in Service Design and using it in your workplace. One of the major advantages for me as a leader in these initiatives is the active involvement of stakeholders from the initial design phase right through to delivery.
Duncan Brown
Quality & Academic Standards Development Manager University of Dundee
2 x 3.5 hours short course
Discover service design Online
Get a comprehensive introduction to service design, the mindset, the approach, and the principles. This one-day introduction (split over 2 days) is designed for those looking to enhance their own skill set or elevate their business.
We will support you to reflect upon what it is you might need to do differently. We’ll help you identify who is key to your services or the experiences you provide.
Who is this course for?
This course is for anyone who wants to learn how service design can help you engage with people, solve problems, and bring ideas into reality.
As you learn about service design, you’ll tackle a design challenge with other learners. You’ll try out some tools and develop skills to bring service design to life.
How will this course help you?
This interactive and activity-led short course will help you to understand the value of service design.
You will learn how the design process supports you to fully understand problems before working towards solutions.
The course will give you the opportunity to try out proven tools and develop skills in a safe environment.
5 day short course
Practical service design
Five six-hour online sessions over five weeks.
Each week you will join others in an online, learn-by-doing environment. You will learn and experience the service design process, making use of a core selection of tools and methods for problem solving.
You will be equipped to:
- Demonstrate deep levels of empathy with customers and colleagues.
- Engage with a core selection of service design tools.
- Drive innovation through empowering others.
- Generate ideas to solve problems.
- Prototype and test solutions.
A relaxed atmosphere was maintained by the trainers. They always felt approachable, interested, and supportive. I learned lots of good techniques I'm looking forward to trying out.
4 x 3.5 hours short course
Service design for data professionals
For anyone who loves working with data, this interactive online introductory course has been designed for you to grow your knowledge of the value of service design. You’ll learn how to use the process to understand problems, to then work towards solutions. You will explore the relationship between information about people (data) and insights (the things we can learn).
How will this course help you?
We will help you to understand how service design can be used to solve problems with (not just for) your stakeholders who need information about people.
You will learn how to communicate and effectively engage people in the story and context of your data, helping your organisation to make data-informed decisions.
The course will help you to think through issues and problems and develop techniques and confidence to undertake user research, analyse and synthesise qualitative data, generate ideas, and create prototypes for testing and communication.
A key outcome will be a shift in mindset. You will learn what you and your teams do as a service that supports others within and outside your organisation.
By the end of this course you will have hands-on experience of service design as an approach to:
- Understand the issues and needs of people
- Work with people to uncover problems
- Collaboratively problem solve
- Develop ways to engage with colleagues, customers, and stakeholders
2 day short course
Design your people experience
A highly engaged workforce offers several benefits to an employer. Creating a good employee experience means that you will attract the best people, motivate them to perform well and ensure that they want to stay. You’ll have created the right conditions to accelerate growth and create a competitive advantage for your business.
Who is this course for?
This course is for anyone who wants to improve their people experience by putting them at the heart of the design process. You might be in a role in a people team, HR, recruitment, OD, a hiring manager; one of the many people who are part of the end-to-end employee experience.
Delivered remotely over 2 days, 10am – 4pm, these live and interactive sessions will cover:
You will:
- be introduced to the Service Design approach and mindset
- develop an understanding of the importance of the end-to-end employee experience
- develop a people centred approach to create the future of work at your organisation
- learn how you can increase employee satisfaction by developing ways to improve the employee experience
Are you aware of service design but have been wondering whether you want to develop your skills further in this field? Could it be helpful to your business or career advancement?
Perhaps you are curious about the value of supporting your employees to use service design to improve your service offering?
Service design helps you design services well. It equips you or your team members with the tools and knowledge to solve problems by taking a human-centred design approach.
Our Professional Development Award (PDA) in Service Design, which is accredited by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA), is a training programme designed to empower learners to grow as confident service design thinkers and leaders in order to transform the organisations they work in.
Who is the PDA in Service Design for?
The PDA in Service Design is ideal for someone who:
- Wants to become a service designer.
- Has been in service design roles and wants to consolidate their knowledge by obtaining a qualification.
- Is looking to empower and enable their team to develop their skills to innovate and problem solve.
- Is in a job role where they want to adapt their current service offering to better suit what customers and colleagues need. They want to create impact by making things work better with the improvement of team processes and working environment.
- Is looking to enhance their future job prospects by upskilling in service design.
It would suit someone who already has a basic understanding of what service design is but wants to be able to use it to create positive change in their workplace. Learners join us from many different roles including digital transformation, organisational development, project and change management.
What’s unique about this PDA in Service Design?
- It is delivered part-time and online, offering you flexibility with your work and the opportunity to build collaborative skills in remote environments.
- Our online and interactive learning labs give you a safe space to practise new methods and techniques with other learners on a relatable design challenge.
- Across the 4 units in the course, you’ll apply everything you learn straight back in the workplace, with your practical assessments based on challenges you or your business are facing.
- On completing the course, you’ll be able to demonstrate that you have the skills, experience and confidence to drive change.
8 Benefits of the PDA Service Design Course
Here are the 8 main benefits of undertaking the PDA in Service Design with the Service Design Academy:
1. Skill Enhancement
The PDA in Service Design involves training and learning experiences that improve your skills in areas such as user research, prototyping, customer journey mapping, and other relevant aspects of service design.
2. Improve Your Problem-Solving Skills
Service design focuses on solving complex problems related to user experiences and service delivery. The PDA can enhance your ability to identify, analyse, and solve problems in innovative ways to help your business or organisation thrive.
3. Stay Updated with Industry Trends
Service design is an evolving field, and staying current with the latest trends, tools, and methodologies is crucial. This course provides insight into emerging trends and best practices to set you up to be the best service designer you can be.
4. Validation of Expertise
Completing this accredited training course in service design can serve as a validation of your expertise. It provides a formal acknowledgment of your skills and commitment to staying current in your field.
5. Cross-functional Collaboration
Service design often involves collaboration and co-designing across various disciplines, including business, technology, and user experience. The PDA can equip you with the ability to co-design and work effectively in cross-functional teams.
6. Increased Job Satisfaction
Contributing to the improvement of services at your place of work or business with your enhanced skills learned through this PDA can not only increase the employee experience for your team but also create job satisfaction for you. The ability to make a positive impact on user experiences and business outcomes can be very rewarding.
7. Entrepreneurial Opportunities
For those interested in entrepreneurship, a background in service design can be valuable for creating and optimising services, whether launching your own start-up or contributing to innovative projects within existing organisations.
8. Career Advancement
Acquiring new skills and knowledge through the PDA can improve your career prospects. Employers often value employees who actively invest in their professional growth and development.
Our next PDA in Service Design cohort starts on Monday 4 March 2024. Find out more and book your place here: https://www.sda.ac.uk/pda-service-design/
One of Service Design Academy’s standout moments of 2023 was when we helped to co-design a unique lived experience tartan at CanDu Cancer Dundee Support Network’s conference at the V&A Dundee
People living with cancer, clinicians, health and cancer support specialists came together in November to share and learn about the value of lived expertise.
Everyone listened to stories about the physical and emotional challenges that people living with cancer and their families face. A thought provoking Q&A facilitated by Dundee and Angus College’s Claire Mackay brought a wide range of voices together
We learned that although cancer treatment is world-class, patient empowerment for mental and emotional wellbeing needs to be explored and elevated. Empathy is good, but it can only go so far. Space needs to be made for people’s lived expertise to be really heard. Collaboration is critical.
Design has an important part to play – not making assumptions about what people living with cancer need, but asking questions and listening to understand what the problems really are. Making sure that everyone’s voices are heard will shape future cancer services for the better.
In the afternoon participants local designers Linsey McIntosh and Gary Kennedy asked participants to think about:
💙 Why sharing lived expertise matters
💛 What practical and emotional needs must be met.
Thoughts and ideas were woven together as the warp and weft of a magical tartan.
Kim Anderson and Robbie Beautyman from Service Design Academy are now working on giving the lived expertise tartan a lasting legacy. They will analyse data gathered to synthesise into themes. This will help Dr Julie Wardrop and the CanDu team to share and continue to action with the Cancer Support community in Dundee and beyond.
Thank you to everyone for making this a unique day.
Peter Nurick Alison Connelly, Vicky Reid Gary, Linsey, Claire, Robbie, Kim, Aleksandra Daszyńska
There were some tears, some shared frustrations and lots of laughter with a fantastic sing-song to end the day with the fabulous Maggie’s Centres Dundee Choir
Thanks to all the partners and people who supported this event.
Macmillan Cancer Support Tayside Cancer Support John Alexander The ALLIANCE
Our lead consultant Katie Murrie was delighted to join expert colleagues and service design practitioners at the Service Design Conference at the beginning of October.
Bringing the best in our industry together to share service design knowledge and new cross-disciplinary methods and thinking The Service Design Global Conference more that met its promise of two days of interactive learning, keynote presentations and in-person and virtual networking.
The theme for this year’s Service Design Global Conference was Catalyst for Change. Our world is undergoing radical, disruptive changes at an accelerating speed. Innovation, digitalisation, and technological and environmental shifts are changing the way we live and work, transforming industry and reshaping consumer demands. Service transformation is at the heart of this change with impacts being felt through new and innovative service experiences that serve people, the planet, and the invigorated organisations that deliver them.
The conference speakers addressed the question – how can service design be the ingredient that not only increases the rate of transformation but also improves its quality and impact?
Katie’s reflections:
Attending SDGC was an absolute delight. It was an incredible experience. The venue was quirky and inspiring, the speakers were top-notch, and the people were amazing.
Surprisingly, despite our strong relationship with SDN (Service Design Network), this was the first time I had attended the global conference in person. I can confirm that it was worth the 6 year wait.
From start to finish, the entire experience, was just a design dream and I cannot thank those involved in organising everything enough – I can only imagine the orchestration that went into creating such a wholesome experience for those in Berlin and those online, using the immersive platform Hopin.
One of the best things about the conference was the line-up of speakers. They came from all over the world and covered a wide range of topics related to SDN. The talks were informative and engaging, and the panel chats were particularly insightful.
But the real highlight of the conference for me was the people. I had the chance to meet and connect with so many talented and passionate people from the SDN community. It was inspiring to see how many people are passionate about what we are doing.
I’m excited to share more about my experience and reflections on the conference in a future post. Follow me on LinkedIn to stay tuned.
As we get ready for a programme of scheduled and customised training into 2024, we reflect on the importance of knowledge and skills gained in our workshops making an impact back in the real world.
Making an Impact
We believe that our service design training should always be focussed on how it will be implemented and put into practice. Our learners and customers know we are all about action!
Building skills and knowledge should improve not only capability for individuals but the capacity for organisations to use service design. Not all our learners will change their job title to Service Designer, but everyone will have evolving mindset and confidence – focussing on people by asking questions, listening, and collaborating to design better services.
We’re working with forward thinking organisations who have different motivations for taking a service design approach – digital transformation, continuous service improvement, effective project management and customer engagement. They all share the purpose of becoming more focussed on understanding and defining problems by speaking to people, to then design better solutions with them.
This is demonstrated with the innovative project we are currently delivering in the South of Scotland with Dumfries and Galloway Local Employability Partnership. This has the critical goal of developing support services for families who continue to be adversely affected by the cost-of-living crisis.
Service Design Academy is training the workers involved directly in service delivery to connect with families to fully understand their challenges to then develop new ideas together with them.
We are energised by this service design for everyone approach. By building skills in how to listen to families, to gather and analyse data to evidence what change is needed, means this is a sustainable way of developing new services. The new skills and confidence grown through this training will benefit not just this programme but drive change in the future.
To ensure that training is sustainable and will make an impact, we are designing learning pathways with organisations in diverse sectors including IT Services, Higher Education, Health and Social Care. Each organisation is focussed on ensuring that their investment will reap positive rewards in delivering better, efficient and effective services.
Upcoming Courses - Book Now
7 hours
30th November and 7th December
09:30 – 13:00
This course meets a growing demand for a comprehensive introduction to the mindset, approach, and principles of service design.
This course is for anyone who wants to learn how service design can help them engage with people, solve problems, and bring ideas into reality.
Find out more about the course here
Book your place here
Four weekly 3.5 hour online sessions from 2 November
This interactive online introductory course has been designed for you to grow our knowledge of the value of service design. You’ll learn how to use the process to understand problems, to then work towards solutions.
You will explore the relationship between information about people (data) and insights (the things we can learn).
The Professional Development Award starting on the 22nd January, is live and online with interactive learning labs. It offers you the benefits of one-to-one support with our expert team, learning resources in a dedicated digital space and the value of sharing your journey with other people developing their service design practice.
Every Professional Development Award delegate also benefits from a full membership with our partners’ Service Design Network for a year.
Find out more about the only accredited PDA in Service Design and apply here:
Fantastic course…..
The best part? The feedback from the stakeholders involved has been very positive!
One of the major advantages for me as a leader in these initatives is the active involvement of stakeholders from the initial design phase right through to delivery.
Duncan Brown
Quality & Academic Standards Development Manager
Univesity of Dundee
You can find out more about the Service Design Academy and what we do to train and educate people to design better services here https://www.sda.ac.uk/
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