In 2014 I founded the discipline of Service Design in Government.

When GDS was founded in 2011, it hired in a small central design team to build gov.uk and support teams across government with design.

By 2014 it became obvious that this wasn’t going to help scale the kind of transformation needed to build truly user-focused services across government. Design needed to expand away from just what a service looked like, to what that service did and why it existed.

I joined in order to establish the discipline of service design – helping the UK government to see and understand it’s benefits.

I later legitimised the role as an official profession across government, doing the hard work to set standard job descriptions, pay scales and grow a community that now totals over 500 within the broader design community across government that I later established.

Credits
To Martin Jordan, who has since grown the community as Head of Service Design
(and who took these excellent pictures)