Month(ish) notes #5 October/November: moving house, inclusive job specs, service design support
This month I’m a bit behind on my monthly writing for October and November. I took almost 2 weeks off to move house, so it has been a period of change. Throughout the month, I felt overwhelmed with feelings and emotions — a combination of excitement, mountains of admin and planning, and exhaustion. We’re starting to settle down into a new area, getting used to new noises, routes and routines, and finding comfort.
Now that we own a house, the wishlist of things we want to do is ever growing — any tips on how you manage that, platforms to use?
What’s been happening
Providing advice
This month, a lot of what I’ve been doing has been around providing advice to different teams on service design and user-centred design. I have really enjoyed jumping from one topic to another and having timeboxed sessions to zoom in and zoom out of specific areas of work. This included helping to scope out UCD for projects and routes to resourcing, and a full-on day of providing service design and user-centred design advice to teams working on CivTech challenges. Some of the things that were on my mind:
- Using intersectionality as a framework in the design of your service or product. This means keeping in mind the variety of ways in which a person may be oppressed. If we’re focusing on one single story, we need to remember we’re only focusing on one single story. We need to look at wider contexts, data, and how we might design for as many stories as possible.
- The benefits of seeing the end-to-end view of your service or product. A lot of the conversations this month have been around ways to find out a bird-eye view of a service and use mapping tools to start conversation, help teams/stakeholders understand interactions and experiences of a service across multiple touchpoints over time. Putting time aside for the process of doing this is probably more important than the output. I see the value of doing this is to uncover spaces where you’re not the one managing/owning the service and discover ways to design interactions with other services/ecosystems of support.
- Defining your service outcomes as a way to align on why your service or product exists. Kate Tarling has really helpful and practical blog on this here.
Supporting recruitment
One thing that has continued from previous months that I’ve been highly enjoying is providing support for recruitment — across the Scottish Government and beyond.
- I had a gap of knowledge in terms of how the recruitment process works in other public sector organisations. So, I helped recruitment for a Lead Service Designer for UK Export Finance, and for Head of Digital for the Crofting Commission. Doing this really helps me develop my own interview style as well as get to know other public sector organisations. It has also helped me provide better and focused mentoring with folks who have approached me for help to apply for jobs. The UK Gov slack channels and the DDaT profession are a great way to get involved across governments and see how things work elsewhere.
- Our own job description for entry-level service designers was long due a refresh. I worked to standartise the job description — to remove jargon that we often use, make it clear that you don’t need to have been in a role titled ‘(service) design’ to apply, and make it more open and accessible to folks. We will monitor how we’re doing on it and if folks from beyond service design job titles are keen to apply. This post on what is/what is not a service designer from Lou Downe has been particularly helpful.
Things I’m thinking / learning about
Voicing my needs for events and meetings
It has always felt so daunting and vulnerable to add something in the field ‘do you have any accessibility requirements to attend this event’. Hence, I’ve never actually used that box. A combination of becoming better with boundaries plus better understanding my own needs meant that this month, for the first time, I shared explicitly what I need from a series of events. More reflections on this to come. What’s your experience been like?
Mentoring rhythms
I first met my mentor on 28th July this year for a hello and a chat to determine if we see the mentoring relationship working between us. Since then, we have only met once more. Our third catch up is approaching in mid-November. A combo of busy schedules and holidays meant that we haven’t had much contact. With all my previous coaches and mentors, we’ve known each other from before but this is new territory for me as we were matched via a mentoring scheme and don’t know each other well.
As the year is winding down, I’ll be reflecting on what I want to get out of mentoring and how a new relationship can be better facilitated. Would love to hear if you’ve made it work!
Grateful for
- My best friend’s daughter being born ❤
- Microbes. To make soils healthy again, we need to start seeing them as what they are: entire ecosystems teeming with hidden life, all run by microbes
- Design for planet — meet-up and conference
