Bringing Design Closer with Gerry Scullion

Sarah Drummond ‘Kicking-starting a design revolution’

John Carter
September 11, 2018
32
 MIN
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Sarah Drummond ‘Kicking-starting a design revolution’

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Gerry Scullion
Hello and welcome to another episode of. This is HCD. My name is Gerry scullion and I’m a service design principle based in Dublin city, Ireland. I recently caught up with our next guest, Sarah Drummond. Sarah is a designer and CEO and serial idea generator. She’s co-founded, SNOOK, myPolice, MyDearestScotland and much more. She was awarded a Google Fellowship for her work in technology and democratic innovation and named as one of Good Magazines 100-extraordinary individuals tackling global issues in a creative way daily. Sarah is a CEO of SNOOK an award-winning global design consultancy based in London and Glasgow. SNOOK on a mission to design a new program that works better for people and this is a perfect segue into what we discussed. We caught up recently in Dublin to talk about kickstarting a design revolution and what that actually means, how we can get design into the social consciousness –

Gerry Scullion
Looking at countries like Finland, Estonia, Germany, and more recently Scotland. We talk about things Sarah instigated in the Scottish design community over a decade ago and how that manifested itself into Nicola Sturgeon. The first minister of Scotland ordering the words about prototyping, testing, and validating. Let’s jump straight into the call and let’s hear. Has Sarah thinks we should start a design revolution? Sarah Drummond a very warm welcome to the This is HCD podcast. Hello. Hello. From Dublin and myself and Sarah were sitting in a hotel in Dublin. We’re, we’re catching up, so if you do some here, some clunky, clunky in the background. We’re not in a pub, but in a hotel, but we will be at a pub later on. Probably. Sarah, welcome to Dublin and I know you’re back and forth year quite a bit with SNOOK, but tell us a little bit about yourself, your, your experience and how you got involved in design.

Sarah Drummond
Sure, so I’m the current director and Co-founder of SNOOK. We’re a design agency based in London and in Glasgow and Scotland and doing quite a bit of work here in Ireland, which is exciting. I was a product designer, so doing what I do know is kind of quite far away from what I thought I’d be doing. I studied at the Glasgow School of art made coat hangers, lampshades bikes, Dan made stuff and with my hands, but learned how to think through making and then accidentally I ended up going and working with a company called Skills Development Scotland, a non-departmental public bodies, so they take policy from the government and turn it into the services we use within our kind of career and skill building. Part of the sector. Did a project with them as a student looking at digital young people’s lever journeys from school and they got really interested in design? And then when I left I ended up working for the masters and fell into designing services of government.

Gerry Scullion
Absolutely. And I know you mentioned earlier about my police in Scotland, something that I read years ago that, but I actually didn’t put the connection back to you at that time. So there’s an interesting about my placement. Maybe you could tell us a little bit more about that.

Sarah Drummond
Sure. Yeah. So, um, my police was a platform that helps the police, talked to the public and the public talk to police, kind of a new way of thinking about closing feedback loops between like public sector institutions and citizens won some money the day after I left university through a competition called social innovation camp. You go along, you build your idea of a bunch of kind of tech heads and business thinkers won it by accident, got invested in by Channel Four. Excellent. A good accident and then someone called Lauren Currie to join the team as well. And together we find it MyPolice, which went on to become, I think the first sneaker project snip project. Yeah. And the first platform for the police to talk to the public online digitally.

Gerry Scullion
Wow. So that’s a really interesting segue into what we’re going to talk today about. Like obviously I’ve returned to Ireland from living in Australia for quite a while. And what I’ve seen in Scotland over the last decade is like you’ve actually built, not single-handedly I’m sure, but like you’ve had a big role to play in enabling a design revolution to almost happened in Scotland. What I’m really interested to hear about is the parallels and things that we could probably do in Ireland or in other countries or even an organizations and what worked tactically and strategically to help evolve an enabled us that design revolution to occur. So where do we start? Where do we go with something like that? It’s a big statement, a design revolution

Sarah Drummond
So…a design revolution in Scotland. I mean, so take Nicola Sturgeon’s program for the government last year, 2017 from the Scottish National Party. It talks about prototyping and testing services with users rather than national program because I’m absolutely incredible. It’s amazing. I mean it’s backed by a lot of hard work from people who are currently inside government are in the wider ecosystem. So your agencies, your education bodies working there, who’ve been tirelessly working for the last 10, 20 years on bringing. I wouldn’t just say design, like user-centered approaches to government and our democracy. So there’s so many things have happened. I mean, there’s critical things I could pick out. So.

Gerry Scullion
So how did Nicola Sturgeon get to be able to award know what a prototype is and to about testing prototypes 10 years ago. I doubt she would have been saying those words.

Sarah Drummond
I don’t think so. I mean, no one was saying those words, but when we started snoop, so 2009, which is nearly 10 years ago, Lauren and I ran the first ever service design drinks up there and seven people showed up. It’s really small. Not a lot of interest, but a real core group of people who were trialling I projects in the NHS, people that Peter Asher and the hides of her project called Alice looking at longterm conditions, working with people, citizens to design what their journey of managing longterm conditions she’d look like. So very design loads, um, people, Lucy Robinson working for Iris, researching social services, running design projects of care leavers. So really, really early stage. Quite naive projects at the beginning. But I saw refundable government where they, those projects funded by government or within a foundation that they sat with the Goddard School of are starting to do work in that space.

Sarah Drummond
So it was really early little network of people working together, handlings of a community sparking up. And then you’ve got what’s interesting about Scotland actually and I think is a big part because this isn’t a design story to tell. I think it’s a story about policy. I think it’s a story about national identity and what and how we want to treat each other. And so there’s things like the Christie Commission that came out by Campbell Christie in 2011, which was about the coach. Well, it’s about the co-production of services. So it was a kind of commissioned on working with local authorities, public sector bodies, interviews with key figures and going, how do we make stuff work for people in Scotland, how will we actually do that? And a paper came out of it with quite a big following. You know, lot of people would probably still mentioned it today even though it’s about seven, eight years old.

Sarah Drummond
Talking fundamentally about co-production, about building and prototyping services with users. So it was that paper, the equivalent of Francis Maude doing what he did in the British parliament in 2011 or 2010. Maybe you could draw parallels, but I’d probably actually say no. I mean, I think what Frances Malian government digital service did was actually quite different. So they had a really clear mandate. Twenty-five services. We’re going to transform them. Huge investment as well as financial backing for that. So they had the ability to bring in some really smart people to government and people already within government to, to work on trump, you know, digital transformation projects. I think the Christie Commission didn’t quite lead to anything like GDS scale. So it’s been a much longer term journey I think for Scotland. Um, and we’re going to do it in our own way. So. Well, whilst we’ll learn lessons from what GDS have done, we’re not necessarily focusing on just digital transformation.

Sarah Drummond
We’re really thinking about the policy of what we do. Bringing the whole of the public sector with us, not just the government and not a kind of centralized necessarily, um, function of digital transformation like GDS. So the paper is not quite similar. I think what’s different in Scotland is there is a sentiment of burned how we do stuff with the people that lived there and making sure that services are inclusively designed with that group. That’s a mindset shift and that’s a huge cultural shift for people working in the sector. Yeah, for the people of Scotland. Yeah, completely. So just looking at the parallels with Ireland and where it’s currently out, like it’s a little bit further behind I guess is, it’s probably the political way of saying it and where Scotland is. Where do you see are islanders as regards to maturity to Scotland in terms of design maturity now?

Sarah Drummond
It’s interesting. We’re doing quite a lot of work here and I saw a lot. We’ve got about four or five projects. Some are finished summer ongoing. So with people in places like Cork County Council and what I find actually is there seems to be a growing hunger for service design. So there’s a, there’s a maturity and the ask of can we use service design? I think what’s maybe not quite mature at this stage is the understanding of what that actually means and our literacy and the fact that for me anyway, my opinion is that service design as a collective verb is something that we all do together. It’s not something that you can bolt on as I can buy and then just disregard and I’d be like, yeah, we just did service design, service, Woo. Yeah, done logo impact. Let’s do the next thing that comes along.

Sarah Drummond
So I think there needs to be some more literacy maturity in thinking about service design is an ongoing capability, um, at a government-wide level and then also at an organizational level within, I think both the public and corporate sector. So when you’re selling service design into those organizations, are you also selling the capability of educating? So to make sure that it can live on beyond whatever you do design, you have to. I mean, you can’t rely on agencies or contractors to come and do the service design bit for you. I mean, as we were just saying like service design is an internal capability and it’s more of a wider perspective on being a user-centered culture, you know, so my job is to help organizations build design capability and build a focus and a strategy to become a user-centered as they possibly can, which is a really interesting model because it’s not like the typical consultancy or agency model where they come in with an RFP and you come back with a response and you’re like, we’re going to deliver all of it for this amount of money.

Sarah Drummond
You’re almost becoming like strategic partners in the organization is people laugh and say it’s a bit of a backwards business model like you’re doing yourself out of a job. But I really fundamentally disagree with that. I mean eventually, you are. That’s the point. Like where my mission and sneaks mission is to design a world that works better for everyone everywhere. And in order to do that we need to ensure that everyone has a role to play in designing, making conscious design decisions. So we have to build that capability. And I think, I think it’s just important to deliver that for people so that on an ongoing basis when you’ve worked on one or two or three trainer projects with them, so you’ve done the expertise of doing design, they’ve learned with you and then you move into more of a strategic space. So you do, you become a critical friend to organizations to help them think about, okay, we’ve got little bit of design literacy now, what’s the next level up?

Gerry Scullion
How do we bring that talent in? And part of that, you know, going back to where the question about, you know, whereas Ireland is about building that, that network of designers that are actually available here to go in and work with those organizations. Because if we don’t have the experienced mature talent here, then we can’t do this. So big part is bringing people back to services. I network I suppose as got a relative play in that. You did mention something that was really interesting about building the critical mass and you know, people asking for service design in organizations. What I’m seeing is that those people don’t need, don’t even know what service design is. I’m sure that happened in Scotland as well. So what things did you do to bring service design into the social consciousness in Scotland? Tell stories. I think I find and steal case studies from other people.

Sarah Drummond
I mean, you know, at the start of SNOOK again, we had no case studies. We just had a hunch and we’d, we’d been studying product design and we recognize the benefits of bringing that into service context for organizations. So I think telling stories is really important. I’m driving the compassion of people to want to change something. So you know, often I’ll spend time with senior leaders and we might talk about service design. We might talk about digital transformation, we might talk about efficiency being a process design, but what I’ll do, the one thing I’ll do is I’ll try and shoot a video or a map, a visual journey map of someone failing to use a service that the organization runs and they’ll go, oh, we need to change that. And I think that’s where the conversation starts about service design because it has to have a mission and a purpose for why you would use that.

Sarah Drummond
You know that they’re currently doing. Yeah, exactly. So it’s got to come back to the context of what you need to redesign. So those stories are really, really important. They’re important for businesses as well, but they’re also important for the future of design and a key to understand what role you feel the educational system has to play in designing for the future. I guess we’re trying to bring design into the social consciousness of the Irish people or you know, anywhere else in the world. What roles to colleges and schools and even kindergarten stuff to play in enabling. Designed to become something that can be spoken about at home. It’s, I think education system has a massive role to play. I mean it’s a big thing we were talking about earlier is if you want to have a country that believes in design and using design, it needs people to design that, that live here and want to live here.

Sarah Drummond
I’m always a bit disappointed actually in the UK perspective on this because we’ve essentially, with our current government, removed a lot of those, you know, cdt, craft design, technology-based topics, graphic design in order to focus more on science. Some of the English language is sciences and I think, you know, we need to take a perspective on the fact that design is the link between math and science and the stuff that we use in the real world. It’s absolutely a casing around technology. So we have to get it into the education system. And I think one of the reasons that I’ve seen this from doing research into, uh, the learner journey in Scotland about how young people make career decisions. One of the core reasons is that the teachers and the careers advisors don’t actually understand where and how design can be useful. So it comes back to the story piece again is we need to show, you know, show some case studies from us or from government digital service or you know, they have in Gds you have 950 designers embedded in government.

Sarah Drummond
And often our parents come to me and asked me, you know, Geez, my kid wants to get into design and I’m just like, I don’t know what it is, they’re going to be an art teacher and I’m like, you really need to look a little bit wider. Actually, that design is one of the most prized skill sets at the moment that we’re lacking experience people in. So we have to get into the education system and really young and start bringing design back in as a topic to teach people about, you know, young kids about problem-solving, about making stuff with their hands. Again, we know making stuff with your hands has a great cognitive effect on your mental health. So not dissing or moving away. Because I studied mass, I studied sciences, you know, I’m uh, I’m interested in them, but I think design has to stop being seen as, you know, the topic for the kids that can’t do the clever stuff they’ve got. We really got to see it as an absolute core skillset to, you know, the future generation.

Gerry Scullion
Absolutely. I remember years ago and mostly in probably 93, 94. I don’t know, I’m a little bit older than you. I’m giving away my age here and I remember saying to one of my neighbors down the road that I was, I wanted to become a designer at that stage. I was learning about industrial design and his interpretation of design was graphic design. It was actually like this computer programs out there, they can, uh, they’re going to be able to take over the job. Did you not going to get a job? And if they only knew now like how popular design has become, especially in Australia, like we’re in the market is booming for designers over there. It’s a, it’s, it was a really good career decision for me to make anyway. And I can, I’d love to go back in time and make sure more of my friends had the courage to really choose design as a career because I know a lot of them now are, are in careers where they’re like, God, I’d love to be doing something a little bit more out there I suppose than sitting in an office cubicle

Sarah Drummond
…for sure. And I think again, story piece, it comes back to what is the public understanding of design. Most of it is capital d, it’s chairs, yes. Form based things. And we don’t have a literacy in what design is and what design thinking is actually really about. So I think if we, you know, we look back in history and the context of where design has been, you know, very visceral in our media is things like, not sure if in the Irish context when all this, but things like changing rooms, right? We used to have Lawrenceville in Bowen and Carol smiling on hemorrhoids. I’m not dissing them. Needed a great fun boy job of turning some pretty alright blocks into horrendous a carpet yoga, luminous green carpet and things like that.

Gerry Scullion
The Blue Peter sort of toilet roll holder design, creative,

Sarah Drummond
this kind of hodgepodge, this kind of vision and we don’t really, you know, other countries around the world where design is absolutely embedded into the culture. Like a Holland who talked about Scandinavia, you know, design is a, it’s a language that they use and literacy. We don’t necessarily always have a pride in that within our own countries. I’ve seen that in a UK context, so I think it’s more stories about what design is actually a boat where it’s used and applied and we need to get that intermediate.

Gerry Scullion
Yeah. So look, just as a great segue again, like into other countries. You’re welcome. It’s almost as if you’ve got a script. We don’t actually have a script. You’re going to list the questions about that. They can go and they can leave at any time. What countries are. We mentioned Finland earlier, like we always come back to Finland on this podcast. I know one of my friends, Peter Lofgren, is that a design and Westpac in Australia. He loves talking about Finland and I’ve learned so much about Finland, especially through his kids. He’s got beautiful children and they all know what design is and it always struck me like the children are seven years old. They know that that Jerry’s a designer in todd, he’s a designer and I don’t think it’s a coincidence. I think it’s in the consciousness of the people I can fend London even in the consciousness of the people in Germany. It’s champion from the parents that are a very young age. That design is something that’s important. So do you have anything to add to that? About what Scotland or like what role they’ve done to improve that kind of perception of design?

Sarah Drummond
I think Scotland has some parallels with Finland in a way, so not necessarily saying that we both cold freezing, don’t think Finland’s as words and we’re a little less shy than some of the finished before. I know beautiful poll as well. You Take Finland for it as an example and I think there’s a good reason to come back to that. So it’s Finland’s like, I’d call it, they’re like a cognitive operating system, right? Like the way that they, that the country though values and principles are sap. So like take movements in the seventies we were talking about of the kind of Scandinavian corporative design, so people like I’m Christian Nygaard are the seventies stimulating projects or like the metal workers union redesigning how interfaces would work. So with the advent of digital being being applied, we thought okay, we’ve got to think about how this is used by people. So we worked with nurses and we worked with doctors and we worked with designers trying to redesign those systems, look like by working with people. So it’s always been in their conscious or kind of operating system to do so. And they’ve gone on to do things like, you know, they’re just on the base of income trial. So they’re testing stuff. So it’s just in their consciousness and I think it’s within their policies,

Gerry Scullion
they’ve always been in that experimentation kind of social experimentation phase.

Sarah Drummond
Yeah. And believing in kind of like a, I guess a kind of equality in our society. And I think in some sense Scotland has that too. Coming back to the Christie Commission and our love of Coproduction, which came from Edgar County in the states, we really took hold of it in Scotland. It’s in a bit of an operating system of how he cognitively think as people we want our policies, so I think if you’ve got that, you’ve already got an amazing platform to design on top of. I think when you. If you don’t have that, you’re. If you’re trying to embed design in a really kind of countrywide level within the system, if you don’t have the operating platform that it’s quite difficult to bring it in because you need those principles to be. You’re kind of a bit of a savior really. You’re kind of backing for it.

Gerry Scullion
Yeah, no, absolutely. Just gone to, you know, there’s a lot of parallels between Scotland or Ireland. We’ve identified that it’s both raining. We both have great music communities, but one thing that we do have in common, I think as we look after our money and businesses, whenever they’re buying design, it can sometimes be perceived that now we don’t have enough money for design. It’s going to stop us delivering the thing that we want to deliver. So did you encounter that in Scotland as regards to selling and service design into organizations where they thought maybe they could just do it themselves?

Sarah Drummond
Absolutely. I mean service design, if you’re having to explain what it is, it’s not going to be already in a budget line of what an organization needs to do. So we’d do a huge amount of upselling and I think one of the main reasons for people finally investing in it was that we managed to create a convincing case around how it would be risk innovation, how it could save money by not messing up a service and designing it without people. So I think in some sense there’s a, there is a financial and economic case to be made. This is relatively easy to make. I mean working with the team down in Cork, you know, we got them a cost saving within six weeks, not a huge one, but you know, a cost-saving and they’ve got 600 services. So you multiply that by 600. It’s actually, it’s quite a lot.

Sarah Drummond
So really, really basic maths can be used, but I think organizations need to see past service design as capital s, capital d, service design and see, as I said before, like service design is a verb. It’s a collective thing that we all do together and some really basic principles that don’t, you know, to enact them don’t, doesn’t really cost anything to do is get over your fear of going and talking to some users, watch them or find out how the use something, find out where it’s broken and test how you’ll fix that. I mean it’s, it’s pretty simple

Gerry Scullion
stuff. I know. Absolutely. I know mark stick to one, and I’ve mentioned this numerous times in the podcast in his episode, he says that he’s not focused on the words service design or customer experience or user experience. There’s just focus on the behaviours of being able to create something and it’s so true. Like if you’re trying to sell something in and it’s. It’s an extra thing that they have to buy. They look at it as, as an extra cost. Whereas if you’re not, you’re selling in a mindset, you’re almost selling in an internal capability. It changes the conversation so much.

Sarah Drummond
Yeah, absolutely. I think though there’s something I would caveat most of that wave because most of my message around what we do, it’s new cares about building that design capability and capacity that everyone is a designer, so everyone’s a designer because every micro decision that we make on the insides of like an institutional boundaries has an impact on the end user experience. Like we’re all responsible for the user experience from Hr Department to finance to digital teams, but we can’t replace hiring great designers to and delivering these experiences takes a full stack of designers so takes user interaction designers to think about the detail of what someone’s actually doing. Content designers the language telling you what to do to move to the next stage of that design and you get good service designers as well. People who are very good at seeing the big picture and the small picture, but they know they can come from other disciplines to. They don’t have to be trained in design, but I wouldn’t negate and ignore the fact that you do need an investment if you’re serious about it, to bring that in-house to bring all those capabilities and yeah, but you don’t need them right from the outset to make change happen and to practice service.

Gerry Scullion
It’s just be locked into the vision like this is where you’re going to have to get to. You’re going to have to make that investment at some point.

Sarah Drummond
Absolutely. And your investment needs to look at the, you know, the wider aspiration and mission to become a user-centered culture. So it’s not only about doing the, doing of service design, like you know, your user research and prototyping to make that service better. It’s also investing in building the products that will help you sustain and build and grow a user-centred culture. So it might be things like pattern libraries, training materials to train the trainer stuff with other parts of the organization. You know, it could be user research library. So the products that help scale good design, you know, they take investment. But again, caveat that back with you shouldn’t be scared of that investment. You can do some quite small stuff at the start.

Gerry Scullion
So just say like in Scotland, like you built the community, you understand who’s who and you got to a point where you’re going to start training the training kind of courses in Scotland, in Glasgow and stuff and maybe putting on big conferences and stuff and people may want to go to those conferences, but they’re competing with other stuff that’s on, around that same time. You know, service design may as well be called apples and pears. They don’t know what it is. So they don’t know if it’s something that they should actually be interested in.

Sarah Drummond
I think you need to avoid this idea of having the big conference. You know, if you start of a journey, you need to start small and you need to start growing a movement around this with lots of, you know, it’s about building and growing a network. So, you know, I’m not using sneakers. The marker of like there was no service design and then there was not a lot. But if I use my decade of experience in Scotland, it’s 10 years now and we finally got to events happening with service design network and that’s great. You know, they finally said we need to start doing some stuff in Scotland, but it’s taken us 10 years. You’ve got a few other events happening with a great organizations in the public sector like registers of Scotland running user research events. This is only happening now. So this has been a very long game of building a movement of people and probably reflect on an event called one team Gov, which started with a group of six people on a mission to try and bring, you know, policy and delivery and everything in the middle of like design and research together to improve services and how government works for people inside the outside’s started with probably like one conversation then for people.

Sarah Drummond
Then six and 12 run one event last on a host of like small tastes or events around the UK. And then yesterday had 700 people from across the world come together and they’re funded in a, in a small sense through government. But it’s the stove, they started really small and their energy just kept running events, even in the face of people going, I’m not really sure what this is a boat, you know, who these people running this Weirdo conferencing. But it’s persistence, it’s persistence and it’s capturing the spirit of people. And so some things happened really fast. That’s a year journey. Scotland, like 10 years, you know, Arland well I’m excited about now is the fact that I’d been having conversations here with a bunch of different people who are kind of doing this kind of work inside organizations but individually. And so I think that group of people that I know, there’s an awesome opportunity for them start doing small events, but you’ve just got to keep it in the public consciousness and it will grow and it really. Patients in a long game of thing.

Gerry Scullion
So Sarah, thank you so much for being here and we’re coming towards the end of the episode and at the end of every episode, I ask our guests three questions. The first question I’m gonna ask you is what is the one thing that you’d like to be able to banish from the industry?

Sarah Drummond
I think the focus on the How and the methods and the obsession with it, so I wrote a, going to claim some fame now, but I wrote a blog post called the ‘what not the of service design’, and it went a little bit viral, which is quite nice. Got Lots of really good feedback on it and I think I always get quite scared to blog and put my opinion out there so concisely but got a lot of good feedback with people saying thank goodness he said that because I’ve been thinking the same for a long time. We need to stop it. I’m interviewing a lot of designers who’ve been trained in service design. Probably kind of start middle of a career and I’ll ask them a question which shows me something you made so portfolio comes out and before I know where I’m being told about synthesis workshop that they ran and there’s a picture of lots of postits.

Sarah Drummond
Its what I want to know is what’s the thing that you designed? What did you actually help design? Maybe not just you, a team of people because design is a collective team sport, but yeah. What is it that you designed and what I’m getting is a list of methods and an excuse that actually, you know, they did some strategy and then it got left to left wind. We need to stop that. We, you know, if we’re talking about designers within the service design industry. Yeah. We need to design some stuff. You need to deliver stuff that makes an outcome. Yeah. So there’s this obsession with methods has to stop and I think we need to educate our clients actually on what design is actually about.

Gerry Scullion
Yeah. So it’s not okay. No. Yeah. Okay. That’s next one. Response. So what does the one professional skill that you wish

Sarah Drummond
better at saying? No. Saying no prioritization. As a designer a business I’m interested in absolutely everything. It’s a downside to having been trained in this, which is to get angry everything around you and wants to fix it. So I wish I could prioritize a little bit more and say no to things.

Gerry Scullion
What are you doing to enable that change?

Sarah Drummond
Saying no.

Gerry Scullion
Saying said no to this. It’s not nice. Sorry, I’m joking. Joking. Yeah. Okay. And the last question. So what advice would you give to design talent for the future?

Sarah Drummond
So I get asked this actually by a lot of people looking to develop the talent, looking to get into service design specifically and they say, I’ve seen this course, what do you think of it? Should I go do it? And it’s either asking me because I’ve done it or giving it. I’ve been about yeah I’m giving it or have evaluated it and I say don’t go and do the course. Go and work in an organization and learn the material of how that organization works. So when I say that I mean is that as a product designer and my material was wooed and metal and glue and paper, that was the materials I learned to make stuff with. If you want to go work in a service design context, go and learn the material of organizations. So the fabric of it. Yeah, like politics, relationships, data and go and make something better there because if you come to me again, I always come back to the context of if I’m interviewing someone, if you can just show me something you’ve made happen in an organization, you go dust because you’ve learned how to do that and design it.

Sarah Drummond
So go and do that. Learn and learn how to get prototypes made early, sort of lean design approaches. Don’t have the process and be purest about it. Just learned how to make prototypes happened, get them out in front of people and do it in a live environment. So go and find an organization that needs help. Maybe a charity offered Stevenson volunteering and learn the craft of making stuff happen with organizations.

Gerry Scullion
Excellent. Sarah, thank you so much for being on.

Sarah Drummond
Thank you.

Gerry Scullion
So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed this episode and if you’d like to be part of the conversation or community, hop on over to thisisHCD.com where you can request to join the slack channel and help shape future episodes and connect with other designers around the world. Thanks for listening and see you next time.

John Carter
Tech Vlogger & YouTuber

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