The value of Service Design My curiosity about how we could bring a fresh perspective to achieve a more inclusive student representation led me to explore new trends in industries that have mastered the excellence of user experience. The world of innovation that emphasises empathy has offered me an approach referred to as service design (Stickdorn et al., 2018). Through a Lancaster University Management School-funded scholarship project, Investigation into service design approach to the annual programme review practices (2018-2022), that was run as a participatory action research project across three UK Universities with more than 100 participants, I experimented with the application of design methods to understand how degree programme reviews could become a space for empathy, co-creation and iterative improvements. Inspired by the application of service design in the public sector documented by Lou Downe (2020), a former Director of Design for the UK Government, I adapted the service design steps to a programme review. The most impactful aspect of designing good service is research, it is that simple. Design research, however, builds on participatory methods rarely applied to student feedback collection such as ethnography and emphasises the importance of data visualisation. What does this look like in practice? The main service design methods used to develop empathy and verify assumptions that I applied together with my students are persona co-creation and emotional journey mapping (Newton & Doherty, 2023). Students work in self-selected teams of four developing a visual poster of a typical postgraduate student, channelling their collective characteristics and providing in-depth insights into their often invisible lives outside the classroom. Once the personas are brought alive, students map the personas’ emotional journeys throughout the programme, recording the ups and downs of their experience. The practical outcome of the scholarship project is a development of an Inclusive Programme Review method (IPR) underpinned by holistic understanding of student experience during their degree programme. The method is built on coimagining and co-creating a roadmap to the future of the programme by exploring possible alternatives, and draws on the following principles: 1. It is holistic – it places the degree programme into a wider University ecosystem and heightens the awareness of the programme’s relation to other interconnected components such as governance systems, decision-making structures, legal and financial obligations, etc. 2. It is human-centred – it places the human actors involved in the programme, staff and students, in the centre of the review enquiring into their experience of the programme flow, their expectations, hopes and struggles. 3. It is co-created – it places agency on both, staff and students, who collaboratively define the programme highlights and challenges and co-create solutions together, in partnership. 4. It is visual – design methods of student persona profiling and emotional journey mapping are developed as boundary objects facilitating educators’ understanding of the heterogeneity of students’ needs. 5. It is iterative – instead of aiming for a perfect and polished complete programme redesign, smaller and regular improvements lead to higher level of responsiveness. Assumptions busted The scholarship project has confirmed that the depth of insights collected through such engagement far outreached the traditional level of information gained in surveys and developed a profound cohort commitment to programme improvement as an integrated part of the university programme experience. Additionally, the method of data collection through the generative sessions (Sanders, 2000) helps establish meaningful and authentic human connections essential for creating effective learning environments. The programme team confirmed enhanced understanding of their cohort leading to greater empathy and better programme design. Students involved have reported increased sense of belonging and appreciation of being considered as human beings. “...I feel it positively included everyone, we were able to all of us get involved and contribute for the improvement.” (postgraduate student, 2019) Off-the-peg resource The research phase of the project has been completed and published as an accessible digital workbook accompanied by a video narrative that can be utilised for a variety of degree programme evaluations. The impact has been noted on Lancaster’s MSc Management programme, which was redesigned with this method for a sequential period of four years with a subsequent significant increase in student numbers, harmonised curriculum, and reinstatement in the Financial Times rankings. 39 Scholarship Matters In my first annual programme review (APR), somebody suddenly said: ‘…and what about the student voice?’. That comment left me wondering whether the established institutional approach to student voice has become self-serving and compliant with global rankings and national student surveys, rather than a true reflection of the changing needs of our students. Is there an alternative for the student voice to be right in the centre of APR?
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTI5NzM=