Service design approach to the annual degree programme review practices

This research paper addresses the challenge faced across the education sector of how to design, organise and maintain a quality educational experience in HE. The findings are based on a two-year research project in Lancaster University followed by a 10 months investigation in four other UK Universities. The paper shows how applying service design approach to programme review empowers student voice and creates a conduit to incorporate more empathetic and human-centered view of student experience. Service design has been successfully adapted from commercial setting to the improvements of public sector, including patient experience in the NHS and to enhance citizen engagement with gov.uk services. The paper provides a critical review of the suitability and adaptability of serviced design to the HE context and it reflects on its benefits as well as challenges connected with the problematised framing of HE as a service sector. </p

Multiple novel prostate cancer susceptibility signals identified by fine-mapping of known risk loci among Europeans

Genome-wide association studies (GWAS) have identified numerous common prostate cancer (PrCa) susceptibility loci. We have fine-mapped 64 GWAS regions known at the conclusion of the iCOGS study using large-scale genotyping and imputation in 25 723 PrCa cases and 26 274 controls of European ancestry. We detected evidence for multiple independent signals at 16 regions, 12 of which contained additional newly identified significant associations. A single signal comprising a spectrum of correlated variation was observed at 39 regions; 35 of which are now described by a novel more significantly associated lead SNP, while the originally reported variant remained as the lead SNP only in 4 regions. We also confirmed two association signals in Europeans that had been previously reported only in East-Asian GWAS. Based on statistical evidence and linkage disequilibrium (LD) structure, we have curated and narrowed down the list of the most likely candidate causal variants for each region. Functional annotation using data from ENCODE filtered for PrCa cell lines and eQTL analysis demonstrated significant enrichment for overlap with bio-features within this set. By incorporating the novel risk variants identified here alongside the refined data for existing association signals, we estimate that these loci now explain ∼38.9% of the familial relative risk of PrCa, an 8.9% improvement over the previously reported GWAS tag SNPs. This suggests that a significant fraction of the heritability of PrCa may have been hidden during the discovery phase of GWAS, in particular due to the presence of multiple independent signals within the same regio

Beyond the Survey:Service Design Approaches to Inclusive Programme Review

The paper outlines the potential of service design as an approach to transformational review of students’ experiences on University degree programmes. The paper presents the Inclusive Programme Review method that has been developed as a human-centered approach to understanding holistic student experience during their programme of study. The focus of the paper is on the divergent stage of gathering insights through collaborative generative sessions between students and programme teams who cocreate boundary objects as a means of communication and shared understanding as well as a stimulus for value-add improvements on the degree programme. The paper challenges the dominant methods of transactional student surveys that generate impersonal facts, depriving educators of a deeper understanding of their heterogeneous cohorts. The aim is to explore the potential of service design, in particular through persona co-creation and emotional journey mapping, to stimulate empathy and purposeful student-staff engagement complementing survey results and feedback forms. The paper showcases the utility of these service design methods not only within formal curriculum design, but also in the overall management and practical delivery of degree programmes. The innovative practice presented here celebrates students’ agency and empowerment for change and contribution to their University experience. This practice is outlined step-by-step, and accompanied by reflections and visual representations, so that any educator is able to apply it to their own context

Empathy in curriculum design

Curriculum transformation projects have become a current theme for many universities who are trying to innovate and future proof their education proposition. Yet, curriculum remains a somewhat abstract concept unless we consciously consider all human actors involved in the education. In our paper, we will bring up the debate about humanness and people centricity essential for curriculum design with examples from business and legal studies

Future in Place : Participatory Future Scenario Planning for Local Policymaking

An increasing body of evidence suggests that the global emergence of Public Sector Innovation Labs over the last twenty years marked a significant milestone in facilitating design-driven innovation in policymaking. However, the challenges associated with confining design expertise to the periphery of the labs, and their focus on national government, leaves regional and local policymaking in the trenches of legacy systems, processes, and skills. This limitation is problematic as it hinders the adaptation of local policies to effectively respond to the unique challenges they face. This paper explores how design can be integrated into local policymaking to support placemaking and innovation. We address this by analysing a case study where the participatory future scenario planning method is deployed to inform local policy on sustainable and active transport in the context of the Eden Morecambe project in the North-West of England

Design Thinking: Practice and Applications

This chapter aims to address one common perception of design thinking—its ambiguous nature and transferability from theory to practice. Here, it features three contextually rich case studies provided by leading academics in the field of design and service design. The broad range of cases goes some way to addressing the widely held misconception of design thinking as a superficial and time-consuming exercise. The three examples offered yield an interesting set of insights as to how design can drive commercial success whilst supporting enhanced end-user experiences