From research in healthcare to culture change in higher education, via service blueprints and trauma-informed design, it’s been a busy year here on the Sparck blog.
A few years ago, the research, design and innovation crew at Sparck/BJSS committed to publishing a blog post every week.
Not as ‘content for the sake of content’ but, rather, to give ourselves the motivation we needed to put our experience and knowledge into words.
We always hear people saying “I ought to write about this at some point…” And with our more challenging posting schedule, we wanted to force ourselves to make “at some point” this year rather in a decade’s time.
It’s been a huge team effort with people from every discipline and every office pitching in with ideas and drafts.
If you’re interested in getting to know us, our passions, and our expertise, it’s worth scrolling back through the whole blog backlog.
You can also check out blog posts on, say, healthcare, or higher education, in the archives for those specific topics.
In this quick round-up, though, I’m going to highlight 10 posts that particularly grabbed people’s attention and drove interesting discussion on LinkedIn.
1. From thinking to knowing: user research in healthcare
Jo Kilcoyne and Karen McIntyre collaborated on this post about how user research can bring real understanding of healthcare journeys and patient needs – rather than relying on what amounts to guesswork. It’s a post that put something important into words and that we’ve come back to, linked to, and referred to often.
Read about user research in healthcare
2. How systems thinking can supercharge service design
This in-depth piece by service design leader Thaddeus Parsons was literally months in the making and also had significant input from Rochelle Eskandar-Simons. It digs into the concept of systems thinking and the tools service designers can use to practice it, such as the iceberg model, and behaviour over time (BOT) graphs.
3. User research in healthcare: public and private sector dynamics
User researcher Rhoda Quist wrote about her perception of the differences between conducting research in private sector healthcare organisations compared to public sector bodies. One particularly interesting idea she mentions is ‘snowball sampling’: “That’s where research participants help us identify other people we ought to speak to, which allows us to explore organic networks.”
Read more about research in public and private healthcare
4. The meaning of student experience in UK higher education
This piece is one of mine but was inspired by a series of conversations with Emma Layton who has a special interest in design in higher education. The post was an attempt to unpack the history and meaning of a buzz-phrase that’s used a lot in discussions around the sector but which has no agreed meaning and, indeed, several competing meanings depending on context.
Read more about student experience
5. What is a service blueprint and why do you need one?
This was a collaborative post between a whole bunch of people from the service design community at Sparck and is full of great quotes and different voices. One important observation is that service blueprints themselves, as artefacts or outputs, arguably have less value than the collaborative conversations that go into creating them.
6. Human-centred design in higher education is a culture change challenge
Before she stepped into a new role as head of marketing for our parent company BJSS Anne Dhir was a creative strategist with a particular interest in higher education. In this post she talks about the challenges of bringing a user-centred design mindset into organisations which might be old, or even ancient, and whose cultures can be particularly resistant to change.
Read more about HCD in higher education
7. Mastering product-led innovation: clearing the 5 big hurdles
This was the first in a series of posts written by a team of Sparck/BJSS working on product innovation. It was written by Rajiv Lewis and introduces some key concepts such as “the product mindset” and the “missing middle”. It’s an essential read if you’re trying to work out how to get ideas off the wishlist, out of the backlog, and out to market – fast.
Read more about product-led innovation
8. How sound design creates more human-centred services
This epic post by Andrew Headspeath could probably have found a home in a magazine somewhere so we’re very fortunate to have it on the Sparck blog. It’s based on months of research, interviews and correspondence and is packed with thought-provoking ideas. In particular, the focus on how sound (noise) can impede the recovery of patients in hospital and affect health outcomes.
Read more about designing with sound
9. Reshaping higher education with human-centred design
Paul Bailey is one of our most experienced consultants with decades of experience. He’s passionate about design education and education more generally and here applies a classic design technique: “How might we…?” questions. Questions formed this way help us focus on positives, encourage us to be broadminded, and give us permission to indulge more ‘out there’ ideas.
10. Trauma-informed research with NHS research participants
Since writing this article in collaboration with Laura Musgrave lead content designer Miriam Vaswani has contributed a chapter to a book on trauma-informed design. Here, interviewing Laura, Miriam explores the concept of trauma-informed design and digs into the practical specifics of how researchers support participants who are carrying trauma. It’s important reading for those working in the public sector in particular.
