Thinks & Drinks Diaries #2
Thinks and Drinks is a Service Design in Education series, hosted by #SDinEd but shining the spotlight on our community members and network around the world. Each month, we highlight a new theme and invite speakers to talk about their relationship with Service Design and this theme.
In January, we kicked off with 75 minutes of lunching and learning about ‘Design Journeys’ where we heard from the Business Enhancement Team from Middlesex University and Anonymous Lobster design collective (you can read all about it here!). This month, we dived into ‘Enterprise in Design’, with our regular Thinks & Drinks on the 18th showcasing three different journeys through Service Design, all with a business focused lens.
So what’s new?
We start all our talks in a similar way, by introducing ourselves, what we do at SDinEd, and the agenda for the talk. Building on feedback from the last event, we switched up the format so that we kicked off with general chat and networking. To encourage this, we provided 3 questions to mull over which were:
1. What’s brewing today?
2. Would you like to be famous?
3. What three things do enterprise and design have in common?
By doing this, everyone could begin to form some thoughts about the theme, learn about why other people were there, and have a nice social 15 minutes before listening to our speakers. It seemed to go down well, so we will stick with it in the future.
Time for the talks!
We had 30 people tuned in and sat back with a warm drink. ready to hear all about Young Enterprise Scotland and Scotland’s Enterprising Schools. The wonderful Fraser Morrison (Digital Delivery Manager) and Julie Degnan (Project Manager) gave us 20 minutes of their time to showcase one of their recent projects and partnerships with third year Computer Science students at the University of Glasgow. This partnership allowed further digitalising of their suite of enterprise education programmes. We heard about gamification, co-creation, and how much the students really valued working on a real life project as part of their studies! And it was great to hear directly from the students themselves.
Second up we had Sonia Napolitano and Tobi Ogunpehin, two of our very own committee members, business school graduates, and entrepreneurial service designers! Sonia told us about her exposure to different disciplines whilst working with the V&A Young Peoples Collective, which eventually led her to EduJam and the Service Design Committee. This introduction to Service Design was the ‘Eureka’ moment that connected her knowledge of business and user-centered design thinking together in harmony, and she has now taken her Service Design knowledge to her team at Festival 22. From Tobi, we listened to her journey through the corporate world into a Masters in Entrepreneurship & Innovation, where she met Radka and “learnt by doing” as part of a Design Thinking module. We saw her compare ‘market research’ in business, to ‘user research’ in service design, and the impact of this in understanding better the pain points of a product or business service.
Q&As
As usual we captured questions and feedback using Padlet, and we encouraged people to continue to post their thoughts to keep the conversation going after the event. Some things that were asked were; “How can we better connect Academic and Real-life?” and “should Service Design be embedded into courses or should opportunities be offered as additional experience?”…
Some great questions to leave us all thinking at the end of the 75 minutes!
FOLLOW UP
We are super excited about our next Thinks & Drinks which will be on 18th March, from 12:30 to 1:45pm. You can already sign up here! The theme is Co-Design where we’ll be learning about the V&A’s Young People’s Collective and hearing from Paul Bailey — head of co-design at JISC. It’s free, and coffees and lunches are welcome (but you have to bring your own!)
We look forward to welcoming you.
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