Reflections on SDinGov 2024
Some notes and thoughts about the SDinGov 2024 conference.
Day 1
Service delivery as a form of care
Rachel Coldicutt’s keynote, mission critical: keeping the lights on while rewiring the house, was mostly about the relationship between public trust and government mission. It was the perfect start to the conference: measured, inquiring and full of wise one-liners (that definitely should be stickers), like:
- AI won’t save a broken system
- FOMO is not a strategy
The thing that resonated most was Rachel asking whether we can think of service delivery as a form of care. During the questions, someone then asked whether service designers should have a duty of care — should we be (legally responsible for?) providing a certain standard of service that keeps people safe?
Rachel also suggested the idea of mini publics over the general public because “universalism is becoming harder”. I like this — the “general public” always feels like one big blobby entity, which fails to consider different groups and needs. (We wrote about something similar at CDL: when you design for everyone, you design for no one.)
On optimism at work
Audree Fletcher’s talk about radical optimism was another tonic. It was full of practical advice for being more optimistic, even when things are challenging or we’re failing.
Some things that stuck with me were:
- plan how you want to show up — you have agency
- have a worry list that others can access
- seeds are not only planted, but also carried by the wind
Audree finished with an image of a coin drop game at an amusement arcade, an analogy about contributing and nudging things forward. You can still celebrate your contributions, even if you’re not there for the final results (or to bag the coins when they drop). Love this!
Playfulness
Two afternoon talks I attended touched on the idea of play and gamification.
The first was a talk by Anna Lay at Hippo about using responsible AI to support healthcare services. What interested me was using games like Guess Who to help demystify AI to the questioning pharmacists they were working with. Such a great example of “stakeholder management” (ugh, hate this term.)
The second was a case study about what happens when information for the public isn’t designed for the public, by Anne H. Berry and Sarah Edmands Martin.
It started with the Mueller report: an impenetrable PDF report of over 400 pages about Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election (yep, the one where Trump was elected). It evolved into a travelling exhibition where designers created an incredible collection of civic posters in response to the report’s inaccessibility to try and increase public awareness.
(The blurb did not do this talk justice, and I almost attended a different talk. SO glad I didn’t!)
Perhaps if we gave ourselves permission to be more playful at work, or to think in a playful way, things could be very different?
Always be discovering
The day finished on a high with Priyanca D’Souza and Ian Ames’ talk, escaping the discovery doom loop.
Speaking from their experiences as a user researcher and delivery manager in government, they identified 3 main loops that keep teams in never-ending discoveries:
- Unclear problem to solve — “we’re not clear on the problem!”
2. Predetermined solutions — “find user needs that support our idea!”
3. False certainty — “we need more certainty!”
Coupled with non-stop pop culture memes, the pair gave loads of practical advice on how to break free from these loops.
My favourite bits of advice were:
- Use the language of due diligence to challenge predetermined solutions
- Radiate intent to your stakeholders
- Always be discovering
Day 2
Less but better
Day 2 started with an enlightening keynote from KA McKercher, author of Beyond Sticky Notes and co-design facilitator. They spoke about co-design as a form of mutual learning, the strain on people with lived experience when they’re constantly asked to get involved, and suggested that perhaps we need less co-design but better co-design.
Their ask was for us to ditch the ‘rigidity’ of human centred design processes and be mindful that co-design comes from a place of care and connection.
While I don’t have co-design experience, this interests me as I feel we rarely make time develop real connections with our clients — often, we jump straight into the work.
Creating truly accessible forms
In this workshop by forms and interaction design heroes, Caroline Jarrett and Vicky Teinaki, we zoomed in on 1 element of a form: asking for a phone number.
I was surprised at how much there was to consider. I loved how they blended theory (looking at WCAG guidance and design systems) with considering our relationships with our own phones, and experiences of giving and asking for phone numbers.
The workshop was based on one facilitated by Ladies that UX Brighton, and is generously available for us to use in our own work.
Scale
After lunch, I went along to Ottla Arrigoni’s case study, a design for policy experiment on water-resilience for Europe. Their brief was to research the fact that 60% of the global population could face water issues by 2050. But, as the blurb says, how do you collect meaningful insights from 27 states and 448 million citizens?
The scale of the project blew my mind, yet they broke it down into 3 neat activities:
- collecting individual stories from people across Europe about the time they realised the importance of water
- looking at water initiatives from European organisations operating at grassroots, local and national levels
- analysing the sentiment of national news stories about water
This description does not do the talk justice — there was so much more to it. But I felt genuinely inspired to think more creatively about research.
“Democracy is a design problem”
Another conference highlight was Whitney Quesenbery’s keynote, Government 360. Director at the Center for Civic Design in the US, Whitney’s focus has been on designing election materials that people interact with. Complementing Rachel Coldicutt’s keynote on the first day, Whitney spoke about bridging the gaps between government and communities and gave dozens of ideas on how to do this.
For example, a hackathon in the state of California where participants were asked to bring along the signs they hated so they could rewrite them together. Or raising awareness of accessibility by creating a booklet called 50 ideas for more accessible voting. I could have listened to Whitney talk all day. You can view the slides here.
Content design and AI
Ryan Haney stepped in at the last minute when someone pulled out of the third day. Although not a content designer, Ryan pitched a discussion about unlocking accessible content design with AI (this links to Ryan’s write-up on LinkedIn).
Inspired by another talk at the conference, he created and showed us an LLM that used GDS style guidelines to improve content. As a product manager, Ryan felt that this would help him with early prototyping (it definitely beats lorem ipsum), and that it could help others who don’t have the resource for a content designer.
I really appreciated that Ryan started this discussion — it was useful to hear content designers’ worries about AI in general. If we don’t listen to and understand people’s worries, we may end up burying our heads in the sand instead of trying to put rail guards in place.
Ryan and I are chatting again this Friday, watch this space!
Governance = happier working lives
The conference finished on a banger of a talk about governance from Lynne Roberts and Mica Moore. The blurb said, “it’s a lot more interesting than it sounds” and it certainly was.
Having worked together on a project between Defra and TPXimpact, they took a user-centred approach to governance and explained why it was like preparing for a hike:
- Where you’re going — strategic direction
- Who you’re going with — your team and support
- Travelling there — prioritising and funding
- Which route you’ll take — different pathways
- Gear and provisions — tools, information and guidance
- Plan for the unexpected — risk management
I loved this idea of using storytelling to help people engage with a topic that’s often perceived as dry. And applying a user-centred lens to things like HR, governance, policy is exciting.
