Design Challenge Competition

Service design plays a pivotal role in enhancing user experiences, driving innovation, and shaping the future across various industries. By applying these approaches and principles we can create and develop services to meet the needs and expectations of our customers.

At the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government, we are committed to fostering innovation and supporting local authorities to deliver user centric public services. To further this mission, we are excited about our Design Challenge Competition, in collaboration with the Scottish Digital Academy and Snook, enabling local authorities to submit challenges they are experiencing with data or digitisation, for a chance to secure fully funded support from user centred design experts at Snook. The competition gives teams the chance to innovate in their problem space, with guided sessions from Snook through each stage of the design process and mentoring support throughout.

From discussions across the Digital Partnership and more specifically with the Local Government Service Design group, we have identified the need to support local authorities to adopt Service Design approaches and principles when attempting to solve challenges.

Instead of the traditional approach of investing in individuals, and by working directly on specific challenges with project teams, we can create live and dynamic learning environments to increase overall awareness and build collective capability.

Verity Hislop, Senior Project Manager, The Digital Office for Scottish Local Government, highlights her excitement around new and efficient ways of working by being flexible in our approaches. “Working within a continually evolving landscape, navigating emerging technology verses legacy systems, increasing demands to deliver more, with less, means that we must be flexible in our approaches and explore new and efficient ways of working. Service design can guide innovation and be the catalyst for seamless experiences. I’m excited to collaborate with our long-standing partner the Scottish Digital Academy with expert support from Snook, on this proof-of-concept design challenge”.

Lee Dunn, Head of the Scottish Digital Academy, illustrates the need for more collaboration as well as an increased focus on service design. “Designing effective and efficient public services that deliver for people in Scotland is essential, and the work that the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government is leading on will create the conditions for empowerment and service improvement across local authorities. We have a long-standing partnership with local government and this design challenge is just one example of delivery towards realising the ambition outlined within the Digital Strategy.”

Becky Mallaband, Head of Learning Design, Snook. 'We are passionate about enabling others to conduct Service Design, by buildings the mindsets, skills and confidence to apply them in their workplace. We are really looking forward to working with the teams in this design challenge, working on real projects, and hopefully having some fun along the way!" 

We are delighted to announce that we have received 15 design challenge submissions from local authorities and these have now been anonymised, shared with our judging panel, along with a scoring matrix for evaluation. 

Our distinguished panel of judges come from various industries including Scottish Government, The Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), The Improvement Service (IS), Health and Improvement Scotland and The Smart Data Foundry, to collectively determine the successful submissions and provide valuable feedback to participants.

Whist we await the announcement of the successful challenge submissions, we will be collating all challenges to explore collaborative opportunities and introducing impactful innovations that will help shape the future of public services.