Practitioner Stories
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 .
Analysis process
Our interview script got separated in 11 themes, each is now one tab in a Google spreadsheet. We went through the interviews and took each insight as a quote and started a first coding to start grouping the data without loosing any raw data. Each one of us was working on one interview at a time. Most of the time, it was an interview we had done and transcribed but not always.
Now we are each taking one tab/theme and reviewing the groupings by taking then as post it on Miro.
On Miro, we are taking only the relevant bits of quotes, reviewing the sub-code, codes and grouping, new groupings and insights are emerging.
Challenges
We are remote
It won’t be a surprise for anyone considering the context. I have met Angela, once at a Service Design Scotland meet up back in January and I’m pretty sure I met Serena once at a DOTI (= Snook events — Design On The Inside) in June 2019. We started working together without really knowing each other previously, we have different backgrounds, different ways of working, so every decisions were a bit harder to make but I think we are starting to really work well together.
We had never done this kind of work before
There has been quite a bit of experimentation because none of us had done this kind of thorough analysis and collaborating remotely. We were a bit lost on how to do it at some points.
Lack of time
I now have my Fridays off since September which is great but I’m also involved in 2 other side projects. Serena is working full time and Angela is looking for a job while doing things like creating a short film to envision the future of Education for the Innovation challenge (By the SIE) and being one of the winners!
We work on our post-it by ourselves when we can and we try to meet once a week on Zoom, for an hour or two to catch up and analyse together. But let’s be honest, we don’t just work on the analysis, there is a lot of catching up and chatting too during these calls. But as many keep saying: we are not working at home, we are working from home during a pandemic, so let’s be nice with ourselves.
The interviews were so rich!
If you have done some research before, you will know that usually from an hour interview, you might get 5 to 10 insights max which are relevant to your research. For us, nearly every sentence is an insight! We were a bit overwhelmed with the amount of great insights we got. We are slowly getting there.
I guess it’s a great problem to have! We’ve been really lucky, everyone has been generous with their time and had so many great things to say.
We are trying hard to stay neutral
The fact that the material is about our own practice makes it a bit hard to keep our distance so we want to make sure that our own beliefs and affects about Service Design practice don’t influence our analysis.
As a result we are extremely cautious. Probably more than we would be on a ‘normal’ project. We want the community to engage with this work, so we are trying to do the best job we can.
It’s also important for us to make justice to the richness of the interviews.
What’s next
Reviewing the frames among ourselves
By the end of the month, we should have most tabs as a Miro frame done with post-it. The plan is to review each other’s frames and add comments (red post it) to it on our own time. Then during our Zoom calls we will discuss each frame so we can reach a stage where we are all feeling this is a good reflection of what we have heard.
Sense making sessions with the SD community
Ideally, we would like to get people we interviewed and the wider Service Design Community to have a look at what we have on Miro.
We are not sure yet how we will do that, but we could have a presentation of the board as a Zoom call or a short video of explanations so people understand what they are looking at.
People could then check the board on their own time. And later we could have collective sessions to discuss the insights, maybe one or two frames at a time as some people might be interested in one or two themes but not all of them?
Write the analysis
Not everyone likes Miro so we would like to write the analysis as a report so we can offer another format. This will probably take some time again, but we feel we need this sense making session before writing.
More interviews? A survey?
To be honest, we have no clue when we will have a report ready and how much energy and appetite we will have left after writing the analysis. But we have many other people we wanted to interview. We now have other questions we would love to ask, maybe as a survey so we can open wider and spare ourselves the transcription part?
Get in touch!
Lately, people have stopped asking us when we would give the results and we are not there yet, but we are still working on it!
It would be great to hear back from people in the SD Community and wider and to know what they would like to see happen with this.
You can get in touch with us individually on the Service Design in Scotland Slack for example or the Public Sector in Scotland Slack, on Twitter, LinkedIn, or via the comments in this post.
To be continued…
Edit 27/01/21: there is a more recent post now:
