Design in government

Creating the space for service design

Jacinta Mellenger – Senior service designer, Department for Education and Lindsey Williams – Senior service designer, Department for Education, 4 March 2021 - Service Design

Service design is new as a discipline at the Department for Education. Jacinta Mellenger and Lindsey Williams share how they enabled it in their division.

Three things product teams need from designers

Chris Hill-Scott, 2 March 2021 - Design, Tried & tested

At the Government Digital Service, designers work with multidisciplinary product teams. Reflecting on his years of experience, designer Chris Hill-Scott describes the 3 things teams need from him: making things visible, making real things, making things make sense.

Starting as a designer in government when you’re working from home

Antonia Awoyemi – Senior interaction designer, GDS, Arindra Das – Designer, GDS, Ella Dorfman – Senior service designer, UK Home Office, Gazbia Sorour – Service designer, GDS and Nikin Nagewadia, Senior Interaction designer, GDS, 15 February 2021 - Community, Design

GDS’s design team grew since moving to remote working in March. For the new designers, it meant having a different start. In this blog post, 5 of them share their experiences, what it was like and what was challenging.

Designers assemble! The cross-government buddy group pilot

Clara Greo – former Lead Designer, GDS, Rob King – Interaction Designer, Ministry of Justice, Roger Wyatt – Content Designer, Department for Transport and Sam McLaren – Service improvement analyst, Dorset Council, 4 December 2020 - Community, Design

Hundreds of designers in all parts of the UK government are longing for exchange while mostly working remotely. A recent design buddy group pilot brought over 170 of them together. In this blog post, the initiators share what they did and what’s next.

How can you support people interested in service design?

Kay Dale - Senior Service Designer, GDS, 3 November 2020 - Community, Service Design

Designers are all inspired to support and encourage other people to achieve their career goals. The challenge can be in fitting this alongside your day job. Senior service designer Kay Dale gives 3 tips on how you can support them more effectively.

Introducing the user-centred design and data community

Jeremy Yun – Senior interaction designer, GDS, Megan Rodger – Design lead, NHS, Pete Jobes – Senior interaction designer, DWP and Benjy Stanton - Interaction designer, Swirrl, 5 October 2020 - Community, Design

There is a new community of practice for anyone working on services that collect, analyse, visualise and publish data and applying a user-centred lens to them. This blog post introduces the community and describes its purpose, code of conduct, and the areas it will focus on.

Being a designer in local government: My time at Stockport Council

Lisa Kowalewski – Design fellow at Tech4Germany, 17 August 2020 - Community, Design

After being the first service designer at Stockport Council, Lisa Kowalewski reflects on her last 2.5 years in local government and shares 10 key learnings – applicable to many parts of the public sector.

How we took a user-centred approach to understanding inclusion and exclusion in the GDS design team

Ignacia Orellana – Lead service designer, GDS and Leon Hubert – Senior user researcher, GDS, 10 August 2020 - Community, Equity, User Research

As part of the GDS design community’s efforts to improve the equity of the team, Ignacia and Leon share their research findings on inclusion and exclusion in the community.