It’s been a busy year for Sparck including here on the blog, where there have been more than 50 posts in the course of 2023.
When the leadership team at Sparck started talking about bringing this blog back to life there were a couple of goals:
The former was driven by a sense that we’d got into the habit of sharing fascinating stuff internally, on Slack, but nobody outside the organisation knew about those conversations.
We talk all the time about the importance of working in the open, and learning in public, and wanted to put those principles into practice.
The latter was about sharing knowledge more efficiently. If a contact or client asks a question, the chances are other people are wondering about the same thing.
And it’s easy to assume everyone knows what you know when they don’t. The more we share, the more people talk, and the richer the conversation becomes.
Here’s a round-up of some of the highlights, and the key themes that emerged throughout the year.
At Sparck, we’re all committed to making services as accessible and inclusive as possible – and we spend a lot of time thinking and talking about what that means in practice.
People from across our practices, from user research to service design, have written posts covering various aspects of accessibility.
Matt Mullan is Sparck’s futures thinking expert and has inspired us all with workshops and talks throughout the year.
It’s had a particular boost this year as everyone tries to understand what the sudden acceleration of the adoption of artificial intelligence might mean. Matt has run several workshops with clients, and with colleagues at BJSS, on this specific subject.
Content design to support crisis communications is an evolving service at Sparck, led by Miriam Vaswani. She has a background in PR and corporate communications. That’s given her hands-on experience of communicating in crises.
More recently, she’s been thinking about how content design principles might apply to those situations.
Content design is about helping people get the information they need when they need it. How do we deliver that when people are in danger, under stress?
The best way for people to understand if Sparck is the right place for them is for us to be open and honest about our culture.
That can feel risky for some organisations but we’ve committed to letting people say what they want to say, how they want to say it.
The results have been among some of our most popular posts because they’re humans speaking to other humans.
Whenever we offer careers advice, or insight into our recruitment process, we get a strong response. In a competitive jobs market, people are hungry for practical advice.
How do I get into design? How do I switch careers? How do I progress?
Two sub-theme here are squiggly careers, which many people at Sparck have had, and the Academy, which is our way of offering entry-level roles.
Putting users at the centre of the design process is the central principle of our work.
Our user research practice is vital to delivering this, giving our teams insight into what people really need from services, and how the products we design could work better.
On the flipside, we also collect examples of ‘deceptive patterns’ and poor design, to help us understand what not to do.
One of the most popular topics of conversation on Sparck’s various Slack channels is tools, tricks and techniques.
From workshop templates to AI tools that can save us time, we’re always sharing our latest discoveries.
We also like to debate the past, present and future of design thinking itself, which sometimes feels under threat.
Follow us on LinkedIn or bookmark the blog to make sure you don’t miss any of our posts in 2024.
There’s going to be more on all the subjects above, plus some insight into the healthcare and education sectors in particular.