Do you remember when you last attended a seminar, workshop, or any other learning event? Did you have enough information about what is expected, did you know what to prepare, who your peers were going to be, how many assignments you would have to complete? Did you feel comfortable in your environment and know how to get around, where to eat and what to take with you? Hopefully you did and that made your learning journey a seamless experience. Or perhaps you stumbled at the first hurdle of a registration form or a failed login to an online platform. Education is not only about the excellence of the content, it is also about understanding how to deliver and reach diverse audiences with different needs and learning backgrounds. Students have told us that they are prepared to struggle and work hard but they really need to know what is expected of them so that they can immerse themselves in an education that is challenging yet attainable. In this book, we explore how academic and professional services staff from across the global Higher Education (HE) sector are seeing the value in applying new work practices with human-centred design (HCD) that can be defined as a mindset towards problem-solving that puts people at the centre. As people working in HE, we should know what learners need, not only in their teaching and learning, but from a pastoral and wellbeing perspective. HCD enables us to explore more deeply how students navigate their way around their learning experience focusing not only on the explicit student needs but also on these latent needs that are often left unexplored.  

Education exists in a system of schools, colleges, universities, and other learning providers who operate complex administrative networks to try to ensure quality and good learner experience. In addition, the system is impacted by regulatory bodies and external accreditation organisations, but also by regional and national policies, economic growth, and political contingency. A change of one part of the system affects another and sometimes even an improvement carried out in a silo may actually result in quality or experience deterioration in other parts of the system or further down the line. The ripple effect is not always good waves. That’s where the application of service design can deliver the holistic view and consideration of the whole system, its culture, values, structures, and norms. Service Design encourages cooperation and integration of different disciplines – in education it may be collaboration between the organisation managers and leaders, the teachers, the facilities providers, the caterers, all those striving for a common goal of enhancing the student experience.