Exploring the Many Sides of Service Design in Education
Medium post taken from SERVICE LAB LONDON talks by Ksenija and Jean on 24th June 2020
When we say that we are service designers in the higher education sector we usually get the same response — ‘oh, that is interesting….how you do approach teaching it?’
For one of us, this is OK, for the other, not.
In this piece, which is drawn from talks we gave (see video below) for ServiceLab London in June 2020 alongside some great people in the field, we want to start out by saying that we think there are two sides to this topic — teaching and researching service design and design thinking methodologies, and actually ‘doing it’ to enhance the student and staff experience.
The two are linked of course although academics are not always practitioners of human-centred design in their own institution, and practitioners are rarely asked to teach or even share their research with their academic peers.
One of us has had a long career as a member of what we would call Professional Services staff and the other is a programme lead of an MSc in Design Innovation. Despite this ‘divide’ we do share a lot of common ground, especially with a new network community — ‘Service Design in Education’ (https://sdineducation.wordpress.com).
The movement was created to bring human-centred research, service design and design thinking to the heart of the student experience and to support those bringing service design approaches to education, be they admin staff, teachers, lecturers, managers or whoever and we are working with the community to get to the core issues which people in education are facing in their day to day lives, working and learning through a global pandemic.
In our talks for ServiceLab London we reflected on our current work and activities. Jean shared some exciting news from activities of SDinEDU Network, and Ksenija focussed on a few themes from her research. Below are extracts from these talks, and full presentations can be found here.
Jean:
Service Design in Education Network is running the UK’s first EduJam, inspired by the Global Jam family, which was going to be at the V and A museum in Dundee this September 2020, but will now be online.
For those of you who are not familiar with the Jam concept, it is a creative space to explore ways to try out design-based approaches to problem solving and to help build networks, and goodness know we all need that right now.
So why and why now?
Much has changed in Higher Education management since the 80s. 1982 — before computers, the internet and so much more that we just take for granted now. The days of re-useable internal envelopes which took a day to reach you from another site two miles down the road are long gone. Then we all had to work to strict policies and procedures so that everyone across the institution had a chance to know what was going on at any point in the academic calendar. There was not much room for experimenting and creativity in those days.
Looking back it is crazy to see how much has changed in that time but also scary to see just how much has not and how much of what still happens on the front line today is legacy stuff from another age.
Universities are large complex organisations all with the same ultimate goal — the education of the students, but chopped into individual silos, re-enforced by top-down management structures, with personal and departmental targets driving much of the agenda and setting priorities. Latterly across the sector there has been a much more overt focus on ‘the student experience’ and we have heard a lot of talk about ‘putting the student at the heart of what we do’ –but too often knowing it is just a mantra, a bandwagon that people were jumping on the back of with very little real evidence.
There was a fashion for creating ‘one stop shops’, driven not by what students really wanted and needed but perpetuating out-dated systems and processes. Information about services was shoe-horned onto online platforms which were not fit for purpose. Every department had to have their own webpage, everyone wanted an app. But did any of these innovations directly or indirectly involve students, to speak to real need? By no means often enough.
Key questions like — what themes do you have coming up in your NSS and other surveys year on year? Are these being echoed in your complaints and appeals? How are you tackling and monitoring issues which students are surfacing in your Programme Committees? What does your staff survey tell you? Are you observing students using your services? What are your External Examiners saying? More particularly, how are you joining all these dots together?
Not only is there silo on silo but, disappointingly, a nervousness about cross-collaboration, often fuelled by top down reporting mechanisms and target setting. A key question for us is how can we help people to start to build relationships outside of their immediate frame of reference, and beginning to understand how each HEIs is one massive ecosystem — a community which needs to come together, to act together, to focus on the end user experience.
Ksenija:
Educational systems are important. They have an impact on what we learn, how we learn, and they inform our daily experiences. Thus, education systems should develop capacity for innovation, not to respond and react to challenges but be proactive, leading on some of these challenges. For example, we can look at what we learn, how we learn, and in what way that learning is supported. Is there innovation already happening in education? Of course! There is vast amount of work that has taken place and continues to be done in instructional or learning design. But as Carvalho & Goodyear (2018) urge us, the complexity of educational provision requires new modes of conceptualisation and rethinking such provision and its design.
Service Design is a human-centred approach to innovation providing an alternative lens for education that is experiential, systemic and participatory.
As Jean mentioned, this approach is important to support us in creating student-centered learning experience and a range of designers and design researchers have embarked on this journey, including those in the Service Design in Education Network.
In addition, we can take one step further. We can use service design to ask bigger questions of our educational system. Joining with other emerging agendas, such as climate change or social justice, to re-evaluate the design of our educational systems and facilitate wider change.
Want to find out more about this new movement? Check us out at https://sdineducation.wordpress.com and join the mailing list to find out about events.
