Birthday Bash — and the power of co-creating
SDinEd is 2 years old this June! (Whoo-hoo!). To help us celebrate Service Design in Education turning two (a toddler already!) we ran a fab ‘special edition’ Inspiration Station on June 25th led by our super, our very own, Sonia Napolitano.
Why did we want to be inspired? Well, after the success of the EduJam and our Thinks and Drinks workshops, we wanted to hear from our community about what they wanted from us, so naturally we turned to the 4 D’s — Discover, Define, Develop, Deliver.
We (a group of five folks who organise stuff) kicked off with a Discovery session led by Chris Muir from the Service Design Academy which left us with loads of questions whilst opening up our minds to lots of possibilities about what a new future for the network might look like. But we needed to hear real voices other than our own, so Sonia took the reins and worked very hard with the research phase, gathering lots of insights through face-to-face interviews (conducted remotely of course!) and desk-based research such as sifting through other feedback we had gathered over past months.
Now we were ready for the Define phase — someone had the bright idea of combining this with our 2nd Birthday on 25th June and a session was put together by Sonia with help from the team. We hit upon a nautical theme for our party, although it did get a bit out of hand when we were invaded by pirates (thank you Zoom filters)!
We often hear that people are looking for practical demonstrations of implementation so decided to show how we could use the tools and methods of service design to co-create our own future — a bit meta perhaps but boy did it work!
Starting the workshop: We started with introductions and creating our own superheroes using the online whiteboard Miro. Networking is a big part of these sessions — it was great to see some familiar faces return but also to welcome new ones too. Some folks had a background in Service Design, some had a background in education, but all were looking for ways to bring human-centred design into their day-to-day work.
We had some personas already drawn up from the research phase but as a group we created a load more with a wider demographic and explored their motivations with some ‘How Might We’ statements.
Making sense of it all: With three Ships Ahoy called ‘Experience of SDinED’, ‘Experience with Another Network’ and ‘Experience of Using Service Design in Education’ we looked at some ‘What floats your boat’ and ‘What sinks your ship’ reflections and turned the negatives into Opportunity Statements. We used ‘dot voting’ to pick out key themes where everyone had three dots and could vote for those which resonated with them particularly. From the comments, there does not seem to be much active service design going on in the world of education — well, not as much as there could or should be, in our opinion!
We moved on to clustering around motivations where four top themes leaped out: Influence and Inspire; Networking and Connecting; Learning and Development and Doing and Implementing.
What’s next: So now we have the four main ‘problems’ we want to solve and our outline design briefs. In our next session, we will move into the Develop phase and starting prototyping using Miro again but also good old fashioned pen and paper.
We also had a Safe Harbour where folks could leave feedback and it was gratifying to see comments such as “Good to feel you are helping to develop something” and “Friendly network — you all seem nice people!”. Service Design is not easy, and there is a lot of work that goes on behind the scenes to prepare these sessions so it does feel nice when your efforts are appreciated.
Why not join us and help shape the future of SDinED?
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/inspiration-station-building-together-pt2-tickets-154839171129
Want to help? We are also looking for people to have a hand in helping to organise the next EduJam. We are still working on a date, but do get in touch if you are interested or have any other thoughts you want to share with us sdineducation@gmail.com.
