23 May 2017

Students and staff worked together with design experts to better understand Re-Act’s processes and stakeholders, and identify and solve their website design issues.

CenSE is not just a platform for service excellence at the University of Edinburgh but also a driver of support for the local community. Thus, six students and four members of staff donated their Monday to help a local non-profit, Re-Act Refugee Action Scotland. Some of the students had successfully completed the CenSE module ‘Service Management’, which sparked the collaboration early in 2017.

The group set out to overhaul the non-profit’s organisational design, in particular their web presence. Two experts – service designer Harriet de Wet and graphic designer Connor Warnock from the award-winning service design consultancy Snook – facilitated the first part of the day. Snook Co-founder and Managing Director Sarah Drummond also represents the consultancy set on the CenSE engagement board.

Students and staff learnt more about Snook’s approach to service design as well as Harriet’s previous service design work for refugees in Glasgow. The team then used some of Snook’s service design tools to get a better understanding of Re-Act, its processes and stakeholders.

Re-Act workshop participants

The second part of the day was all about trying to identify and solve website design issues for Re-Act. Fellow CenSE engagement board member Steve Currie from Murray and Currie Property helped the team clarify thoughts and consider strategies for future action. The new web strategy will be finalised together with Re-Act in a second workshop this June; follow CenSE on Twitter to see our results.

A big thank you to all participants and, of course, to Harriet, Connor and Steve for supporting CenSE!