Hamilton Service Jam 2012

I was disappointed to miss last years Global Service Design Jam so I’m keen to make it to my local one here in NZ this year – hosted by Wintec in Hamilton and organised by Matt Currie of divergent (@divergent_nz). The Global Service Jam, done in the same spirit as the Mozilla Design Jams,  involves a potentially random group of people coming together for 48hours to create something – in this case a prototype of a new service.

They are the kinds of meet ups and distributed global conversations / productions that are only possible thanks to social technologies – but they pick up on a general spirit of sharing, openness, fun and collaboration that are inherent to people who like to create things together, and who recognise the possibilities of starting from nothing to build – who knows what.

The Service Jam runs (roughly)  5pm 24th February to 5pm 26th February

Find your local event on the Global Service Jam site, or

Register for the Hamilton event

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Developing ReachOut.com’s Future Service Strategy

[edit: the slides have been temporarily removed - back up as soon as possible! apologies]
The slides are up from our recent presentation at Ozchi in early December. “Developing ReachOut.com’s Future Strategy: A case study in user centred design methods to marry user led and public health program development approaches”. (I say “our” but Kitty and Mim did all the work pulling the pres together I think!). It presents a case study on how user-centred and participatory design methodologies helped bring young people and mental health professionals together to create the future service strategy of Inspires online youth mental health service, ReachOut.

One of the reasons I love working with Inspire is that their approach is inherently participatory and young people play an active and influential role in all aspects of the organisation from governance and hiring to service design, delivery and evaluation. Everything they do is user-led and co-designed, but it is also evidence-based. This means that all design decisions are based on extensive research, integrated with and driven by clinical and social objectives, research, theories and knowledge and the impacts of services and interventions are continually evaluated and iterated over-time. The level of rigour in this presents a lot of design challenges, but is also hugely exciting and rewarding!

Big props to Kitty Rahilly who did a really fantastic job of presenting and representing and making available this annotated slide deck.

Enabling Codesign

Natalie Rowland and I have just published another article on UX Magazine Johnny Holland about Enabling Codesign. The article was inspired by a workshop on Codesign Methods I ran with Design Masters students at UTS earlier this year that shared some of the methods and facilitation work we do as designers to enable stakeholders to actively participate in the design process.

“The term co-design refers to a philosophical and political approach to design best applied throughout the design life cycle [1].  Codesign builds on the methods and principles of Participatory Design which assumes ‘users’ are the experts of their own domain and should be actively involved in the design process. This article explores some of the methodological tools we use to enable codesign. Specifically, we explore the rationale behind some common workshop techniques used early in the design process, which combine the activities of research and idea generation…” Read the rest of the article on Johnny Holland