Weeknotes: Week 1, 18–22 Jan

Ok, week 1.

Doing

I’m currently on a brief soujourn to our public sector/ gov team where I’m focussing on health related service design projects and loving it.

We’ve spent part of the week speaking to various people who are involved with delivering a service in the UK that provides physical health checks for people with severe mental illnesses.

It’s a critical service as many service users die much earlier than they should from preventable diseases that would be spotted during these health checks.

Not enough of these health checks are happening so we’ve been asked to help find out why and investigate some ideas to improve the service.

One of the most fascinating conversations with one of many inspiring people we spoke to was around how we might train health care professionals to think like designers in order to try out new ideas to tackle the wicked problems they face.

This blew my mind a bit and has left me pondering how we might prototype this idea.

I love the idea of prototyping non-digital things, especially as many touch points have nothing to do with digital at all .

‘Digital’ transformation is in my mind wrongly presupposes the method of transformation to always be digital which is clearly not always going to be the best option.

I’m for ditching the term all together and focussing on continual improvement instead. Slow but steady wins the race and all that.

I’ve been really enjoying reading more about service modelling after stumbling across this great article by Ben Holliday.

I’ve used some of this thinking to inform the categories for a service model canvas that has provided a useful way to pull everything together that we know/ don’t know about strategy behind the www.talktofrank.com service that I’m going to be working on.

It includes useful prompts such as:

• What is this service for?
• What problems does it solve for the people who use it?
• Where is it currently failing and succeeding?
• How will we know when it is working well?
• What are the guiding principles that underpin it?
• What hypotheses do we have about how it is being used and what would improve it?
• What might we do next that will result in the greatest positive impact for the people who use it?

I’ll write it up in some form and share the canvas if it proves useful. It feels like the way forward because these questions are seldom answered despite being fundamental to the design and provision of good services.

The lockdown has highlighted the disadvantages children face when trying to keep up with their education without access to devices while stuck at home. We’ve been trying to help with this problem in Bristol. If you’ve got a spare device or would like to donate towards buying some here’s how you can get involved.

Thinking

Perhaps it’s some sort of consequence of lockdown and lack of normality but for some reason my brain has gone into overdrive recently.

I’ve been keeping a list of the things that are flying around my head in an effort to get them down and share them to see if they might turn into something of value.

Here are a few that I’ve been mulling over this week.

File under #brainfart and approach with caution.

• Specific aspects of services are improved but this piecemeal approach results in the equivalent experience of going out for a meal and the highlight being the warm welcome at the door and everything else being horrific.
• Successful projects are all about asking the right questions throughout from the first new business conversation to the very end. Who, what, when, why, how and where are your friends.
• Don’t try and innovate until you’ve nailed the components of the service you offer that are fundamental to its success. Do you even know what those components are?!
• I love the work I do because it’s a combination of art and science. The scientific method is a thing. It turns out it underpins the work we do to design and improve services. Hypotheses, experiments, results, conclusions is all familiar ground and such as solid and established basis for what can feel like a new industry.
• Critical thinking skills are so important for designers. Listen, understand, interpret, apply. Fiz found a lovely video that taught me a lot about something that is more understandable than it sounds!
• Surely all good services are run in some way by the people who use them. When I floated this on twitter Steve ‘Doc’ Baty summarised it beautifully with an idea that really got me thinking “This goes beyond the idea of Participatory Design almost into Participatory Delivery”. Definitely something to explore here.
• Working as a solo researcher is rubbish. The joy and value of shared research sessions with others who can help you reflect on what you learn and how to interpret learnings is huge.
• Given that the internet has commodified knowledge, skills are the things that will differentiate people in the future.
• Projects can do on for so long without service users feeling any benefit whatsoever. A useful weekly habit should be for projects to ask themselves ‘has anyone benefitted from our work yet?’.
• The environments people are working in at home are endlessly fascinating. We are living through daily video call versions of ‘Through the keyhole’. It should now be acceptable to halt any meeting and questions just why that person has a stuffed gazelle on their mantelpiece.

Inspiration

Last year fellow Bristol UX’er Alan Colville broke the Guinness World Record for the most altitude metres gained on a bicycle in 48 hours.

In this wonderful interview Alan talks about how his experience has benefitted so many other areas of his life. I’m a huge believer in the benefits of sport for both physical and mental health and loved how Alan talks about the relationship between his work and cycling and how one benefits the other.

My mate Sam put together a freakzone mix for Stuart Maconie. It’s been a joy to listen to it while working and so cool to hear a mate on national radio.

This podcast with Auschwitz Survivor Dr Edith Eger made a huge impression on me and has really helped me to try and roll with the punches during lockdown. I can wholeheartedly recommend her book ‘The Gift: 12 Lessons to Save Your Life’

I really enjoyed this short video from service design pioneers Live Work from 2003 during which they talk about just what they do and the value that service design brings to the organisations they work with.

I learnt that Barnados have build an intranet that everyone can access. Does this make it their website or their intranet? Who cares….it’s a cool idea.

A highlight this week was when a child psychiatrist I was interviewing waved a copy of Lou Downe’s book ‘Good Services’ at me which reminded me to actually read my own copy. It’s a must read, a good read and an easy read so a rarity amongst ‘work’ books that often get bought, flicked through then never read.

Playing

During lockdown last year I decided to try and make a bookcase to house a box of favourite books and to scratch an itch I’d had for a while to have a go at making some furniture.

I managed it in the end but trying to cut a straight edge with a circular saw was nearly the death of me in every respect.

I could no longer suppress the urges last weekend and bought a track saw.

I managed to cut a straight(er) line first go last night without any collateral damage or top tier expletives.

This could be a game changer. Diving into the garage for an hour after work is proving to be the perfect ying to the eye boggling Zoom meeting yang.

Project coffee table is go!

My family may not see me for a while.

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