Update October 2020 — Reflections on the project itself
This is a project I’m working on along with Angela F Orviz and Serena Nüsing. We are collecting stories of Service Design in Scotland. It started with a tweet in June and our last update was in August.
Quick summary
Since June we interviewed 15 practitioners, from different parts of Scotland, across various sectors and in various roles: a lot of Service Designers but not only (see infographic below). The interviews were recorded and transcribed. A first coding of the data was then started and we are now analysing it .
This was initially published on my blog on the 06/05/20 — check this more recent blog post about the project
About 1 in 7 people in Scotland can’t get online. This is about 800,000 people (more data at the end).
There are various reasons:
- money: can’t afford a device, to pay for broadband/data, or to get the assistive devices they need
- lives in an area with poor infrastructure
- lack confidence to use an online service themselves
- lack digital skills
When you work in the public sector, you have to make sure you service is accessible to all and to have…
Experience on Medium as a reader
Medium has been really good for me when I started learning more about Design. There were a lot of good articles for beginners level. But lately, I find less and less interesting things there.
- You can highlight part of an article or make notes. I don’t use this that much, but it’s quite handy when you want to come back to an article and look for a specific part.
- When you read a lot, you reach the limit of articles you can read pretty quickly, so you have to subscribe. It’s not super expensive but still…
- To…
From empowering teams at work, to workers taking back control and communities getting together to lead the change they want to see happen.
Quite often, you hear/read about a concept somewhere, and then it keeps popping up elsewhere. Recently, for me, it was about people self-organising to reach their goals.
Agile works better when the team is really empowered
In my experience, in different work places and contexts, the teams I was part of did the best work when the stakeholders were off or busy doing something else with no time to question us or interfere.
Suddenly, we could decide together as a team what would work best to…
Even if you don’t know how to code (you can read it on my blog)
DevTools are initially for developers but you can do lots of quick tests and changes with it. Even if you don’t know how to code. Don’t worry, you won’t break anything.
This is something I often use to do some quick changes to a page, then use the screenshot of it to support the discussion for a change request.
I’ll explain for beginners how to
- see how a page looks on a mobile or tablet (using your desktop or laptop)
- remove an element of the page
- edit the text on the…
Applying as a child (you can read it on my blog)
My children, like me, have been in Scotland since 2005, they are all students just now, so could stay using their student status at the moment, but should apply before December 2020, if they want to stay after their studies.
They can apply using me as a ‘sponsor’ as they are under 21, or they can apply for themselves. In that case they will need to prove 5 years of UK residence which is not that straightforward as they won’t have many documents in their own name other than…
This time, I’ll tell you how you get the news and what to do to prove your status to someone…. part 3 will be how fun it is to apply for a child.
Timeline
- May 2005: move from France to Scotland
- June 2016: Brexit referendum
- March 2017: Article 50 is triggered
- January 2019: the scheme opens, I make my 1st attempt to apply for settled status=> can’t pass the second scan of my passport step.
- May 2019: 2nd attempt, passport scans ok, but they only give me pre-settled status and want me to mail…
Edit 8/05/20: Read this on my blog (more up to date)
A while ago, I saw Sanjay Poyzer’s journey to become a service designer. I decided to use the same idea to map my professional journey for LinkedIn. I didn’t have any fancy software, so I used draw.io as it’s free.
To reach your audience, make sure everyone can access your posts. (read it on my blog — it’s more up to date)
Alt text
All your pictures (including diagrams) should have an Alt text (alternative text) which will be read by a screen reader for users who can’t see them.
Here how to do this:
When you add a GIF, describe it [in square brackets]
If you are using HootSuite:
A good link to understand more about alt text and how to do a good one:
A longer guidance here:
Capitalise your Hashtags
Capitalising the first letter…
Data terminology, resources, how to manage, interpret and visualise data. (you can read it on my blog)
Data is everywhere
So whether you like it or not, it’s probably best to understand the various aspects of it. This is what I’m trying to do here.
“The world’s most valuable resource is no longer oil, but data” — The Economist
