This is not really what I did this week. This meetup poster is not nearly representative of my activities in the past days; it is quite the opposite. But by the end of the week, I managed to frame a poster and put 2 others up on the wall in a spare minute.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We are good to go for next week\u2019s meetup, and I\u2019m looking forward to it. However, all spots are gone, and a growing waiting list exists.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Much of my time this week went into hiring and procuring activities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We have not 1 but 2 working student roles prepared and ready for publication. The first is a user research operations position. We are looking for a human factors student or someone from a similar background to help us across service areas and teams with operational tasks. That includes preparing, running and analysing user research activities and creating summaries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
With various related degree programmes in Berlin, Sonja and I are reasonably optimistic about finding a suitable person interested in gaining hands-on experience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
At the same time, our parental benefits team is looking for a forms designer to help them create and maintain their PDF and paper forms. It\u2019s an ongoing task that keeps our designers too busy and away from other pressing activities. As a role for a working student, it\u2019s operational and somewhat technical. We expect decent knowledge of Adobe InDesign from the candidate to create well-structured files resulting in accessible PDFs. I hope enough graphic design students with sufficient technical prowess in the wider Berlin area are interested in this.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As various teams suddenly need support, I have spoken to several freelance designers this week. We might be looking for service design, interaction design, and user research support in up to three different areas. Some work is more operational, and some is tactical with strategic dimensions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Dealing with procurement processes and filing evaluation forms for candidates is not my favourite task. Occasionally, it keeps me busy, like this week.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Somewhat apart and still related, Marion and I spent some time sketching how to place accessibility content, guidance and tools on our website<\/a>. That\u2018s relevant for communicating with talent and articulating our expections.<\/p>\n\n\n\n So far, accessibility has been mentioned only a couple of times outside of our blog. But we expect the people who work for and with us to bring at least a basic understanding of accessibility and inclusive design and research approaches. So, we need to make that clear. We have done some work and continue to do more. Making those learnings visible with stable entry points and sharing the tools we developed in-house is vital for attracting the right talent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n We could be doing many things, but we need to start small. Hopefully, we can add some accessibility-related content before the end of the year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Another non-related building block for attracting talent this week was an interview. I recorded a conversation with Philipp Thesen, a professor of human-computer interaction, and Birgit Marger, a professor of service design, for the German Design Council\u2019s Design Perspective podcast<\/a>. We spoke for about 40 minutes about service design in the German public sector. The episode is supposed to be published in January.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was most impressed this week on Thursday at about noon. The 3 designers on the Digitalcheck team did a project shareback during our discipline weekly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While working on digital-ready legislation checks, they started running short-term \u2018regulatory support\u2019 sprints. For some weeks, small multidisciplinary teams support a federal ministry\u2018s policy team just working on a new piece of legislation. We started doing this at the beginning of the year, when working on a new energy tax bill<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The key activity is bringing the outside operational reality to the law drafters. Writing laws that cannot be implemented due to operational real-world constraints will have no or very little impact. So, the key question is: Can we, as the state, deliver on the policy intent in the way the law draft describes?<\/p>\n\n\n\n The multidisciplinary team checks that. It moves product, tech, and user-centred design expertise upstream. In the context of the energy tax bill, this meant bringing policymakers to head customs offices to show what processes look like today and map them to sketch how a law could effectively support the policy intent.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Investing in this, bringing multidisciplinary digital expertise to a government initiative early on, reduces a lot of burdens, and essentially waste, further downstream and increases success factors severalfold.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I am hopeful we can prove the positive effects and work with more ministries in the future on legal initiatives.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Imagine having user researchers & service designers review new laws & regulations before they get proposed.\n\nThey could check which proposal in a law-in-the-making makes sense, is operationally feasible and can deliver on the intent.\n\nThat\u2019s what we are doing, and I\u2019m so impressed by the team\u2019s work<\/p>— Martin Jordan (@martinjordan.com<\/a>) November 1, 2024 at 8:37 AM<\/a><\/blockquote>Manifesting new frontiers for designers<\/h2>\n\n\n\n