Using design to rethink our approach to work and skills Taking the opportunity to step back from what we’re doing and questioning what really matters can make all the difference.
Going Mainstream We've been developing our understanding of service design practices for over three years now, and there are some great examples of projects elsewhere on this blog.
Music & Design: spaces with purpose, expectations, and collaborating I don’t often spend eight hours of my weekend on a train, but this weekend I did just that.
Walking in their shoes What young people need in order to thrive is a question that we are setting out to discover in Worthing.
My Service Design crew I am a proud co-founder of a local service design breakfast group which meets monthly in Brighton. The gathering is a space for discussion and support for service designers living and working across Sussex.
We all fall over I heard this comment from a man at a service design event I attended a few months ago...
OpenCommunity Report After 49 in-depth interviews in three council areas - Adur & Worthing, Devon and Buckinghamshire - council partners are delighted to publish the research findings from OpenCommunity, the MHCLG funded project exploring the case for a community-based services data standard.
Finding out what the customer wants for an Effortless Service “The spoken word belongs half to he who speaks and half to he who listens." - French proverb
Social Housing Repairs: UX for the ‘Back Office’? Spending time struggling to renovate my own house has perhaps unsurprisingly got me reflecting on the Adur Homes Repairs app that we successfully launched at the end of last year.It was an
Software helping to keep track of journeys through the system I’m working on the ‘Effortless’ programme at Adur & Worthing Councils - trying to make it effortless for customers to contact us and get their query dealt with.
Let's get things wrong! I'm a recovering perfectionist. I used to hate getting things wrong at work and would do anything I possibly could to protect myself from being thought of as anything less than excellent.
Someone else's shoes I’ve been thinking about whether what we’re doing with SameRoom is just a case of putting ourselves in someone else's shoes.
Insight is not a waste of time I’m a millennial! Straight away I expect the word ‘millennial’ fires off thoughts in your head: ‘phone addict’, ‘Twitter’, ‘Facetime’, perhaps?
Getting onto the balcony Imagine you’re on the dance floor of a nightclub (a hazy memory of mine as a parent of a one year old!). You’re trying to see what’s happening...
Santa's Agile Christmas Ever wondered how Santa manages to seamlessly design, build and deliver presents, each year?
Preventing homelessness through collaboration Six tips from our shared experience of what it takes to do multi-agency service development.‘When you work in the public sector with limited resources, you often have intractable problems. No one service
Walking in the customers’ shoes Imagine you’re a skilled car designer and have been asked to design a new car for an already-crowded market. Would you jump straight into drawing possible designs? Probably not.
Frictionless Self Service As a rule, self-service portals are rubbish. We set ourselves the challenge of simplifying this process
Becoming more outlandish… “It’s easier to push an outlandish idea down the hill to become more sensible than it is to push a boring idea up a hill to become slightly more interesting.”
The Robotic Council If you have ever seen movies like Ex Machina, Transcendents or I Robot, you will know what I mean by Artificial Intelligence.
Working on Wellbeing In this series of blogs, I want to share experience and learning from a major SameRoom project on loneliness which is currently underway, and also talk about the development of our overall policy
Sprint design for early intervention programmes ‘For decades, homelessness has been seen as a problem that needs to be solved by the local authority. But in Adur and Worthing, as elsewhere, we don’t have enough social housing to
Homelessness is everyone’s business How we’re working together to identify triggers for homelessness early on and support people before they reach crisis point.
Four months’ work and three minutes to our first self service request We had four months, the shortest project I have ever worked on, and it seemed like a very, very tall order. Luckily, I was not alone and I am proud to say it’s been a success.
Introducing SameRoom. Over the last couple of years we have been learning and practicing human-centred design as a way to approach organizational change.
