Last week I spent most of my time at SDinGov. Having not been for seven years — and my principal memory of doing a lightning talk and being so nervous it overshadowed everything else — I wasn’t sure what to expect. What I found were great talks, great people, and something we covered in our talk: community.
Service design is a funny one for me. In my mind, having started in UCD in 2009, service design was what user experience (UX) work always promised to be. I saw everything as being part of UX design: online/ offline, backstage/ frontstage. Then over the next few years it fragmented and narrowed in scope until it became overly focused on the digital part of it.
A shame. But in its place came service design (because of course, the need was always still there).
When I went to SDinGov in 2019 I was not technically a service designer, but a ‘UX consultant.’ That meant doing whatever was required, including research, and including service design. We just never called it that.
When I became Head of UX at Nomensa in 2020 I could see more public sector talk of service design but we didn’t have the language to talk about it internally properly — even though we were doing it — so we got the The School of Good Services team to do some training with us.
In 2019 therefore I didn’t feel particularly part of the community; I was more an outsider. And particularly because a lot of the talks were ‘coalface’ talks by people doing the nitty gritty of service design, and I was in an agency, perhaps slightly removed from the reality.
And then of course I was in a mess about public speaking. It was a small slot, but I got into a bad place with it — mainly because it was my first real go at public speaking.
This year was totally different. Not only am I at the coalface, but I’m much more experienced now in speaking. Furthermore, service design has grown in my own mind into something I can embrace fully; I felt more at ease and more comfortable talking to people about it.
If you combine that with lots of interesting and friendly people doing work adjacent and relevant to us, then it starts to feel like a real community.
And that’s the feeling I left with: community. I felt as part of one. I felt like that the profession is in a good place. I felt like we’ve got great people doing great jobs out there.
I don’t know if I’ve ever felt like that about my profession before.