7-9 March 2018
John McIntyre Conference Centre, Edinburgh
About our Updated Identity
Returning participants to Service Design in Government will have noticed that we’ve given our visual identity a update this year. We wanted to provide a bit of background to our motivation, and our aims for this project.
Our Motivation
We've been encouraged by the passion our participants have brought to the event since it's inception and have enjoyed seeing Service Design as an industry, and particularly in government, growing and developing in the period since SDinGov began.
The time felt right to shake things up ourselves a little to bring you something new. Something that more visually put Service Designers, our users, first.
Our Aims
Our participants join us from all over the world, with previous years seeing Service Designers fly from as far as New Zealand, Singapore, Colombia and many countries in between. They bring unique challenges and experience with them.
We want to do more around representing our international community. We also want to represent people that aren’t yet coming to SDinGov, that we hope to welcome in years to come.
When organising our conferences we aim to provide an inclusive environment that is so natural, welcoming and safe for everyone that you don’t even think about it. Our hope is that we make all kinds of people feel welcome by including them in our visuals.
Our Approach
In discussions with our designers, we agreed that an illustrated approach could allow us the greatest flexibility. In this case, illustration serves as a tool to represent the widest range of people, problems or actions in the way that is most consistent for our identity.
Where possible, we’ve based our illustrations on photographs of participants from previous SDinGov conferences or on photographs of speakers (in particular our lovely Keynotes) for the coming year. Our aim is to give you a realistic view of the event, even in illustrated form, and we are working to keep expanding the base of Service Designers we welcome. Feel free to ask us about how we are currently approaching improving the welcoming and inclusive nature of our events.
If you've joined us for SDinGov in the past and you'd like to see yourself represented in our visuals, please get in touch with our team including a picture of yourself and we’ll make it happen.
Our Ongoing Aims
We hope that our work is received positively, however we know that we’re still just scratching the surface of what it means to be inclusive and representative.
We’ll need to look beyond our own biases and experiences and we expect to fail many times in the service of our aim. This is an ongoing process and we relish the challenge of constant and consistent improvement. We hope that our current work provides a good foundation for future iterations of our identity.
We've still a long way to go in rolling this out as SDinGov 2018 draws nearer, and we look forward to deploying the new identity across the wide range of collateral we design for our conference.
We welcome any feedback on how we’re doing, especially if you don’t see yourself, or your specific challenges, represented.
We’d also love to hear from anyone interested in helping us test and review our illustrations or designs. Please contact us to get involved.