Service Design-in’ at Now Foster
An asynchronous interview with Jan Blum, co-founder of Impossible Ideas and Venture Design Director at Now Foster
Q: Ciao Jan, please introduce yourself.
A: I’m a co-founder of a public sector venture studio called Impossible Ideas Inc. and currently, Chief Design Magician at a not-for-profit Start-up we helped build and then launch in March 2023, called Now Foster.
At Now Foster we’re a small team made of 6 people on a huge mission — changing how fostering is done and perceived in the UK. A human-centred approach in fostering is so desperately needed as the experience for fosters carers is clunky at its best and discouraging at its worst. Not to speak of the lack of agency that many children in care have and the scandalous outcomes for many young people who leave care with little to no support.
Now Foster helps local authorities to find people who want to foster children, supports them through the application process, provides child-centered training, and offers a support network and tailored coaching.
Q: How do you define Service Design?
A: Service Design is when a group of people with the right skills come together to design a service that helps its users to get what they want from that service. In our case, the teams have design, social work, community outreach, marketing and fundraising expertise. It’s a team sport and the Service Designer is the professional who facilitates the design process and guides a team of experts from different disciplines.
Q: What’s the current Service Design setup at your company?
A: As we’re a start-up we are pretty much a design-led organisation from day one. Whilst not everyone in the team is a designer, we all apply a human-centered mindset, making decisions and designing based on the needs of the people who use the service. For example, we work with a group of care-experienced young people to co-design with and involve foster carers and social workers in testing and prototyping.
We’re a small team and besides me, there is one other designer with a stronger focus on the digital side of things. But to be honest, at this stage and with the size of the organization we all do a bit of everything — my work also includes some Org Design, Business Design, Product Design, and Marketing. I really enjoy that overlap of disciplines because I’ve always struggled with labelling myself just as a Service Designer.
Q: What’s the relationship between Service Design and the other disciplines at Now Foster?
A: I work hand in hand with the CEO, our Marketing Lead, our Practice Lead, our Digital Lead, and our Business Designer. I run a weekly Experience Design Meeting where we discuss where our service needs improvement and what the opportunities for innovation are. Sometimes that’s small things like rebranding ‘respite fostering’ to ‘weekend fostering’ because it sounds less daunting to people. Or it’s something bigger, like a specific type of training module we want to develop. We then agree on actions and ownership — so it could be that I’m assigned to action something with the Marketing Lead and the Practice Lead. It will be interesting to see how we can keep this level of collaboration once we scale our operations.
Q: Let’s talk about your Service design work. What are the typical initiatives you work on?
A: I hold the overview of the end-to-end experience and identify with the wider team where we need to make things better or design something from scratch. There isn’t a typical thing I work on — I get involved in everything that needs designing. That could be a digital tool to learn about fostering, a welcome pack for new foster carers, or a new role that we want to test.
Something I worked on lately was child-centered training for foster carers. I worked closely with our Practice Lead and a Videographer to interview care experienced young people and together we designed and tested the training materials.
I also love our Foster Readiness Checker (I know, clunky name) because it helps people to understand what fostering is about, what the different options are, and what skills they need.
I also get involved in more internal design challenges like the onboarding process for new starters, our business model, or our theory of change. It’s that combination of actual design doing and the big picture/systemic thinking that I really enjoy about my job at the moment.
What I also find interesting is the transition from innovation to continuous improvement of the service.
For the last 6 months we built the organization and the service but now that we’ve launched our focus is on making what’s there perfect. On the other hand, we need to keep an eye on the future because we need to have a clear vision of where we’re going to convince investors to give us money. We have regular internal meetings to discuss future avenues and opportunities and a fantastic advisory board that we meet with every 2–3 months or when it’s needed.
Q: How do you prove the impact of Service Design?
A: We’re measuring the quality of our service experience through a mix of quantitative and qualitative methodologies. We surveyed people who became foster carers through a Local Authority and an Independent Fostering Agency to get baseline data that we can use to compare it with the experience people have with us.
We also do qualitative interviews with our users to understand different touch points more in-depth. In our area of work, it is very important to stand out at every stage so we need to ensure that we’re not just good enough but exceed people’s expectations.
Q: How do you educate your organisation on the Service Design approach?
A: I developed learning sessions around Human Centred Design that I walk my colleagues through. The sessions include introductions to Service Design, Service Patterns, Design Research, and Prototyping. It’s important that the team has a basic understanding of why we’re doing the things how we’re doing them. Of course, this is just theory and most learning happens when my teammates participate in activities like doing interviews, brainstorming ideas, mapping a process, or testing something.
Q: What’s the future of Service Design in your organisation?
A: At the moment it’s hard to think about that as we’re in full start-up mode and there’s always a danger that we run out of money. However, let’s assume we get a huge investment then we’d be keen to grow our team of designers. Whilst we’re scaling we need a great design team to make sure we get that balance between improvement and innovation right that I mentioned earlier. Improvement and innovation need to happen in parallel because we need to deliver a great service whilst being ahead of our competition. Getting this balance right will be crucial for our success.
Q: A service you wish you had designed
A: I like Beam the social enterprise that supports people who experience homelessness to find work or stable housing. They recognised that there are a lot of people who, with a little bit of help, could get on their feet again. Their business model is interesting because it’s a sort of crowdfunding for individuals through donations. And they are digitally native — meaning that the service experience with them is really good and not clunky at all.
Q: How can people follow you?
A: You can find me on Twitter: @jottblum or LinkedIn. Now Foster is on Twitter, Instagram @nowfosteru and Linkedin.
Service Design-in’ is a collection of thoughts and interviews with Service Designers working within organisations. Please reach out if you want to share your views.
