Authors: Sheila MacNeill, Andy Youell  

Technology is often hailed as the cornerstone for transformation. Indeed, technology can all too often be seen as the only way to bring about transformation.  This techno-centric perspective all too often fails to acknowledge the key to any kind of organisational or societal transformation – people. If you don’t fully understand the actual needs and context of your people then you will never be able to enable any kind of transformation.  

Service Design provides truly flexible and adaptable keys to understand the context of our students and staff and indeed all users of HE. It is all too easy to assume that we know what our ‘users’ need and that the curriculum, courses and systems we develop work for them. All too often they don’t – or more accurately they don’t work as well as they could. Every time I take part in a service design workshop, I get a true sense of delight as I see participants so readily engage with persona development, work through scenarios and share their lived experiences to inform meaningful and sustainable change. This book provides a rich picture of the positive impact that a service design approach brings to all aspects of the contemporary university experience. I would recommend it to anyone working in HE today who really wants to work meaningfully and collaboratively with students and staff to improve the university experience.   

Sheila MacNeill, independent consultant specialising in all aspects of supporting digital learning and teaching   

The power of information technology has increased exponentially for over half a century and with this has come an increase in our expectations of what data and systems can achieve. But meeting these expectations requires transformational change and too many digital transformation projects have stumbled. Technology investments need to be undertaken as part of a broader approach to managing change across the human aspects of organisations. We need to shift our focus from the technology to the people.    

This book sets out a manifesto for human-centred design in Higher Education. It brings together coherent, workable theory and lived examples of successes that have been achieved by wrapping services around the people. They say that the only constant is change so whatever your role in HE, there is something here to help you navigate change and meet the ever-increasing expectations of those around us.  

Andy Youell, HE data and systems expert