Design Challenge Competition - Meet the Judges

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.

In collaboration with the Scottish Digital Academy and Snook, we launched our Design Challenge Competition in November 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.

When considering our judges, we wanted to ensure that we included individuals with extensive expertise and passion as well as the knowledge and insight to enrich our panel and inspire participants. Therefore, please let us take this opportunity to introduce you to and show our appreciation to those individuals behind the scenes who kindly took the time to:

• Review entries and assess the submissions based on predefined criteria.
• Collectively determine the successful submissions and provide valuable feedback.

Their involvement will be instrumental in advancing service design principles across local government, as highlighted in the National Digital Strategy.

Aaron Slater

Aaron is the Digital Inclusion Manager at the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations (SCVO), the national membership organisation for the voluntary sector. Aaron has worked in different roles in the voluntary sector for 15 years.

As part of a small team, his work centres around building capacity and capability of organisations to deliver digital inclusion work. He was involved in the initial design and delivery of the Scottish Government’s ‘Connecting Scotland’ programme, supporting over 60,000 households to get connected. More recently, his work has been focused on digital inclusion in health and social care settings, with a focus on drug-related harm, mental health and housing.

Aaron refers to the uniqueness of the submissions and how we can use service design as an enabler; “It’s been a real privilege to review the 15 Challenge Submissions, each unique and innovative in their own way. We live in a digital world, but not everyone is able to fully participate, especially those living in poverty. Innovative service design is a key enabler to understanding how to deliver better services and improve access for those who most rely on it”.

Elizabeth Brooks

Elizabeth Brooks, MSc Remote Sensing ISEB Project Manager, has more than 10 years working in service design within Health and Care, initially specialising in digital innovation. She set up Experience Labs at the Digital Health and Care Innovation Centre and led the design team for the Scottish Access Collaborative and other commissioned work for both NHS boards and Scottish Government. 

Elizabeth spent 20 years working internationally, based in the Netherlands working in commercial software design and delivery. She leads the Design Community of Practice and is currently working in improvement of services for those with co-occurring mental health and substance use support needs.

Elizabeth shares her delight and interest in the next steps: “I was very pleased to be asked to judge the submissions for this competition. The proposals were very well thought through and it’s exciting to see the ideas being floated in the organisations that took part. I look forward to seeing the progress that I’m sure will be made.”

Martin Lang

Martin Lang studied Product Design Engineering at Strathclyde University providing him with a solid foundation in design processes and methodologies. Upon finishing his studies, Martin jumped into the start-up space with a focus on User Experience. He worked for Renfrewshire Council for 3 years as a User Experience Officer and Service Designer, designing and improving the online experience for users and staff. Martin is now a Service Designer for the Improvement Service working on national systems. 

Martin is a champion for mental health, service co-design and continuous improvement. Martin believes mental health of users and staff is negatively impacted by a "big bang" approach to service design. Making lots of small improvements with regular feedback over time will result in a better service, especially when the goalposts keep moving.

Martin comments on the range of challenge submissions: "Being a judge for this Service Design Challenge has been very thought-provoking! There are such wide-ranging challenges being experienced by all Scottish Councils right now, therefore trying to determine which submissions should be taken forward was very difficult. I'm confident the Service Design assistance provided to these winning submissions will have a real positive impact on the final outcome for the service and will provide great experience to the teams working on these projects." 

Rui Cardoso

Rui Cardoso is highly experienced with a career spanning the public, private, and academic sectors. He has a strong focus on digital and data transformation. Having played a crucial role in successfully delivering digital initiatives across the public sector during his time at CivTech, Rui’s deep knowledge of public sector transformation was instrumental in driving the development of challenge creation methodologies and facilitating productive collaboration between the public and private sectors.

After his successful tenure in the government, Rui transitioned to the private sector, joining Wallscope as a leader in business development, strategy, and growth. Now, at the Smart Data Foundry he heads up the Insights team, with a focus on driving adoption of near real-time private sector data to help drive evidence-based decisions in the public sector.

Rui highlights the opportunity to understand challenges with the potential to develop and scale solutions: “The design challenge was a great opportunity to understand the issues local authorities face around the collection and use of data. I’m excited to see how solutions will develop and scale across Scotland”. 

Verity Hislop, Senior Project Manager at the Digital Office for Scottish Local Government, outlines the need to embed ways of working and tackle challenges with collective support:

“If we truly want to progress and tackle challenges collectively by adopting service design approaches and principles, we must embed these ways of working into everything we do. It’s fantastic that we can progress the successful challenge submissions with fully funded support from Snook, however this is only the beginning. Now we must consider the additional working groups and how we make this opportunity relevant to all those councils who took the time to share their issues. We have an experienced panel of judges with diverse expertise, as well as long standing partnerships across the public sector, the real value is bringing everyone together and to approach this collectively to maximise positive outcomes”.  

We will be reaching out to all Design Challenge submission contacts once we collate the overarching themes and identify the expertise to help us approach these challenges in collaboration. These opportunities provide us with the possibility of scaling solutions and sharing with the wider Digital Partnership to accelerate progress aligned to local, regional and national priorities. 

Stay tuned for our next update where we will provide you with an overview of the successful challenge submissions currently being progressed with Snook.