On Wednesday, a group of communications and media design students from the Hogeschool van Amsterdam visited. As part of their 3rd-year studies of user experience and service design, they went on a learning experience journey to Berlin. Before coming to us in the afternoon, they visited the video game museum I still have to see.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Their tutor had reached out a year before but was told the design team at the DigitalService needed time to mature. This time, within 100 minutes, we first gave them an overview of what DigitalService is and does<\/a> and how we work as designers in a multidisciplinary setup. Then designers Dirk, Nadine, Sabrina and Tine gave an overview of our work on accessing legal information, running digital checks for laws-in-the-making, and designing services faster with component libraries and design system patterns.<\/p>\n\n\n\n After a bit of warm-up time, the students wanted to know how we deal with potentially slow culture and resisting mindsets in government, how to get accessibility prioritised early, what tools we use and what we are looking for in a designer when hiring one. The tutor wanted to give his students an idea of 3 different types of organisations: public sector\/non-profit, external consultancy, and an in-house team. So they went on to visit Accenture Song (formerly Fjord) and Zalando in Berlin. <\/p>\n\n\n\n