Materiaalit

In this podcast we discuss about youth information and how to use service design in youth information development. As guest we have Arielle Tye from Promo Cumry in Wales and Imre Simon from ERYICA, European Youth Information and Counselling Agency. As the host Mika Pietilä from Koordinaatti. All podcast guests collaborate in Erasmus+ funded project called DesYIgn. You can listen to our podcast here or on Soundcloud.com. Transcription of the podcast can be found below after the reference list.

 

 

Reference list

ERYICA www.eryica.org
ProMo-Cumry www.promo.cumry
DesYIgn-project: www.eryica.org/activities-projects

 

Transcription

Mika Pietilä
Welcome listen to Koordinaatti podcast, special edition, we have two guests in this broadcast from organisations we cooperate with, for example, at the moment in a project called Design with our guests, we are going to talk about youth information, developing youth information services and how to use service design methodology when developing services targeted to young people. I warmly welcome Imre Simon from Eryica European Youth Information and Counselling Agency. Hello, How are you?

Imre Simon
Hello. Good morning. Very well, thank you. Happy to be here and participate in this podcast.

Mika Pietilä
Great. Good to have you along with us, and I also warmly welcome Arielle Tye from Promo Cymru. How are you?

Arielle Tye
Good morning. Yes, feeling good. Good to be here.

Mika Pietilä
Great and my name is Mika Pietilä. I'm a staff member in Koordinaatti.

Mika Pietilä
Arielle, you are working in an organisation called Promo Cymru in Wales. Could you briefly tell us from a company what you do and what you work with?

Arielle Tye
Yes, so we are a Promo Cymru where a youth organisation and we've been working in Wales for over 30 years, the majority of our work is around how you engage, inform and connect with young people through digital services. So we provide a lot of information advice services. We run the national helpline for young people in Wales is called Make Cymru, and that provides youth information via text, phone and instant message. And we also engage with young people a great deal using social media and then another sort of area of our work is actually now working with a number of organisations, mainly youth organisations, to support them, to actually develop their digital services. So we do a lot of work around service design, but our sort of aim really is about supporting young people and communities to be able to be informed, to be able to be engaged and to be able to have a voice and participate.

Mika Pietilä
OK, thanks, everyone. And what kind of work are you doing in promo Cymru?

Arielle Tye
So I am a head of development. So my role very much revolves around a sort of developing our services and looking at sort of, I suppose, how we evolve, what we do to continually meet the needs of young people and how they sort of access services. So my work is very much around service design. So I do lots of work with organisations helping them to sort of rethink and reshape their services so that they better meet the needs of young people today using digital technology.

Mika Pietilä
Great. Sounds very interesting, um, our listeners for sure thinks that what does Cymru mean? Could you tell us?

Arielle Tye
Yes, Cymru means Wales and Welsh. So in Wales, we part of the UK, but we have our own language. So Cymru means Wales.

Mika Pietilä
OK, that's interesting, Imre, you are working in Eryica, European Youth Information and Counselling Agency. Could you explain to us a bit what Eryica is and what are the aims of Eryica and what you are working with?

Imre Simon
Well, if I wanted to put it very simple, Eryica is a network of youth information centres in Europe, and to elaborate on this a bit, we can say that we are an independent European organisation. We are composed of national and regional youth information coordination, coordinating organisations. And see and Eryica was established in nineteen eighty-six. So we are turning 35 next month, which we will celebrate on the 17th of April in the name of European Youth Information Day. And we work to intensify European and international cooperation in the field of youth information, work and Youth Information Services. We have currently thirty-six members in twenty-six countries. And if I had to categorise, I would say that we work in two main areas. One of them is making youth information work visible on different levels. This has a lobbying and advocacy aspect, youth policy development, for example. And on the other hand, we provide our members with opportunities for professional development. And here we mean training and capacity building of youth information workers, exchange of good practise the exchange of experience and developing innovative tools and resources like the one we will talk about today.

Mika Pietilä
OK, thank you. Sounds very, very interesting, where is the headquarters of Eryica?

Imre Simon
Eryica is based in Luxembourg. Since 2007 and before we had our head office in Paris.

Mika Pietilä
OK, so in Central Europe, in a small country, Luxembourg, you can find Eryica.

Imre Simon
In the very centre and a very small country now.

Mika Pietilä
Yes, great. What kind of work are you doing in the Eryica at the moment?

Imre Simon
I am a development manager at Eryica and I am responsible for different aspects of development. So it includes training and capacity building of the information workers, the training system of Eryica that I am in charge of. I'm also managing some professional development projects and also the cooperation with the Council of Europe just to make the few main areas

Mika Pietilä
OK. As I mentioned in the beginning, we all from three different organisations, from promo Cymru Erika and Koordinatti we work on a common project called Design. Could you, Imre, tell us a bit more about this specific project, for example, the aims and what kind of outputs, who are partners in in in this project and how it is financed?

Imre Simon
With pleasure. So the Design project is about service, introducing service design in use, information, work and services. So the aim of the project is to to to rethink how services are designed and how to create tools and resources that allow youth workers and youth information workers in particular, to reach out to a higher number of young people. And how we aim to reach this is that we believe that youth information providers need to be aware of a need to be trained on how to design their services in a way that is user-centred, which is innovative, is user friendly. So it is appealing to young people to help them reach out to young people. The project will produce three main outputs. The first one is desk research, combined with focus group interviews, which is already available on our website, Eryica dot org. And then we will have a service design toolkit for youth information provision and an e-learning course that will be based on this tool, which is based. I can almost see it now on this tool kit and as some smaller but important outputs, we could also produce service design strategies in the participating countries. This is a European project. We have nine partners who are developing this, so this outputs in service design and this includes, as you said, because, in the beginning, Koordinaatti in Finland, Promo Cymru from Wales and Eryica in Luxembourg is coordinating organisation. But we also have our colleagues from Ireland, Malta and Spain who and then another organisation from Luxembourg who is contributing. We also have another Finnish organisation, Åbo Academy, which is the only member of the consortium that is not a youth information organisation, but a higher education organisation. And their participation has been very useful. And you ask about the financing the project is running in the framework of the Erasmus Plus programme. This is a key action to the project, which has started in 2019. It was planned to take place or to run for two years. And then because of the covid pandemic, we prolonged it a bit. So we will finish and produce and present all the outputs by the end of June 2021.

Mika Pietilä
OK, thank you. That was a very good introduction to our Design project, which we all are working with. Imre mentioned that we are developing a tool kit on service design in new information. You have, Arielle, worked hard with this tool kit with your team in Wales. Could you tell us a bit more about this tool kit and what kind of process we have developed actually during them during our project in service design for youth information services?

Arielle Tye
Yes. So what we did at the beginning of the project is we looked at different ways that we could work with the service design process. And together we came up with a four-step approach. This is very close to the service design double diamond, and it basically takes you through, discover, define, develop and a final phase that we sort of renamed called Do It. And what the service design process is really is a process of innovation and it helps anybody who's designing services to actually start at the beginning to think about what people need to do, some research to define really understand the problem, and then only then to start to build and develop very small solutions that can be sort of tested and built upon in the later phases. So it's a four-step process. And what we've done with the service design tool kit as we've explained every phase, so we've explained the process. We've explained sort of why it's important to use information. And then as the tool kit goes on, each phase has also got a number of activities that you can do. And then at the end of the tool kit, all of these tools are there. And I suppose the aim is that a youth information worker, after doing the training, can actually pick up this tool kit and have a whole set of resources available to them so that they can continue to rethink their services and design them using this four-step design process.

Mika Pietilä
Yeah, this sounds very, very interesting and it's been very interesting also to be part of the development when we have been working with this, the service design project, with the design project and also with the tool kit. Imre mentioned that that as a part of the project, we have been working also and we are going to launch an e-learning course as one of the outputs. And this is something I have personally been working with a lot, together with my colleague Jaana and colleagues from the other project organisations. It's been an interesting journey to try to develop an e-learning course around service design and especially to integrate the content from the tool kit that Arielle was telling us. I see that this e-learning course will be an excellent way to become familiar with service design. And at the same time, during the course, if you participate, the course to test also service design methodology. And this testing is possible. As I said, one of the tasks during the course is to test a service design methodology through, through and your own small project. Arielle, why do you think that it's important and good to use service design methodology when you are developing services, for example, to young people or what kind of experiences you have from your work? You're told that you have been working a lot with service design in your own organisation.

Arielle Tye
Yeah, I think at the moment particularly, it's so important, I mean, this last year has shown us that we've had to completely rethink how we do things. The sort of rising, I suppose, in technology has meant that actually, services have to very quickly adapt to be able to continue to stay relevant to young people. I mean, the way that young people access the world is completely different to how it was five years ago, 10 years ago. And actually many services haven't necessarily been able to adapt as quickly as young people have. And I think that service design really helps us to bring in a process to be able to do that because actually, it can be quite overwhelming to sort of think about how we redesign things to make them relevant to young people today and what service design does. It actually gives you a phased approach. And it is that there's certainly a lot of skill to designing services. But what this can give you is a really simple process to follow. And if you follow it and if you embed the principles within what you're doing, your services are going to be more relevant, I believe. The very initial stage is just so important. It's called Discover and that is just all about really understanding what the challenges are for young people rather than assuming we know what the solutions are. This is all about really thinking about what are those underlying problems. And once we've sort of worked that out, what we build is very, very small. So we don't then think, right, we need a website or we need an app. And then we spend all of this money developing that. And it might not be the right solution. And we see this a lot. So service design sort of makes you slow down and actually do things slowly and incrementally. So that actually what comes out of the end of it is something that's useful and that meets young people's needs.

Mika Pietilä
Imre, what do you think? Why it is important or good for your service design metrology when developing services in use information or in Eryica, for example, in Eryica member organisations?

Imre Simon
Well, we work with videos, information. This is our core business. And I can see that the landscape, the information landscape has completely changed over a couple of decades. And the young generation of today is probably the first one in history who do not face an information shortage. But on the contrary, they live in information overload. So the value of information does not lie in its scarcity anymore. And as such, we have to put more and more emphasis on the accessibility and the user-friendliness of the EU's information services. So we have to make the extra mile to make our services attractive as well. But this is one thing. Another issue is that it is amongst our core principles that see the services that we provide to young people that we could develop for young people should be provided in a way that matches the needs of the target group and to always pay attention to the to these principles whenever possible. Also involving young people in the development of new tools and services and also make sure that the end result is what young people need, is what they like is what they would be happy to use. And this is, in fact, a win-win situation, so in introducing service design, principles in our work will be beneficial for both sides. Because on one hand, if you the more young people you reach, the more young people will be informed, the more young people will have the chance to become active citizens. To make informed decisions and on the other side, it also reinforces youth information providers and their role and their status. If their outreach is higher if the services are of better quality.

Mika Pietilä
Yes, very, very good thoughts and wise words you said in. Is there Arielle something that you would like to say more about social service design, or have you, for example, faced any fears in people when they have been starting a service design process, for example?

Arielle Tye
I think the fear comes sometimes from organisations feeling that the pressure of having to adapt to have to be available on every single social media channel, to have brilliant websites, to create videos, to create podcasts, I think it's can be quiet I think the fear comes from that feeling that you have to do everything. How are you going to keep up? But actually, I think the process itself, when people start to look at it, it can actually really help with that because it can say, you know, you don't need to do everything is just making sure that what we do is really meaningful and really works. And we're not putting loads of energy into, you know, all of these different things that potentially aren't really getting the outcome that we need or supporting young people in the right way. So I think that is a fear around transformation and there's a fear around change. But I think this process, because of the way it breaks it down into stages, I think once you sort of start using it, that it can actually really help you to step back and think, actually, you know, let's just tackle one thing at a time.

Mika Pietilä
Imre, what do you think? If we think now that the design projects so we are facing a very, very strange period of time with covid-19. So how has the project progressed? What do you think of as a project coordinator, a manager at the about the results of the outputs? How do you see that? Or do you think that that the project partners and use information field will benefit from this project outputs?

Imre Simon
Absolutely. I am. I am convinced about that. Well, as you referred to the current situation with the pandemic, it also meant that the information youth centres were at times had to be closed and they had to transfer the services to the online space. I mean, this is not something new, of course, is information providers have operated in the online space for a very long time. But with this forced push towards not face to face services, it also means the creation and the development of several new tools by all of our member organisations in all the countries. So I think this is a crucial moment. And in this sense, it comes at a crucial time when all the organisations are developing new services, new online services, mostly with the fast pace then to have a tool in their hand that makes these new tools and services user friendly and easy to use and everything else that service design can assure us.

Mika Pietilä
Imre, you mentioned also that part of the project there has been desk research focus group interviews, where can listeners find this report?

Imre Simon
The listeners can find this report on the Eryica Web sites. I will spell it because it's not that evidence. So it's Erica is spelt like e r y i c a dot org. And there if you click on our web site on the tab, what we do. There you find in the other activities and other activities and projects, there is more information about the design project and on the tools and resources, they can download the desk research report, focus group report, but also many other exciting tools for the development of user information.

Mika Pietilä
Thank you. That's the report is very interesting and I think that many youth information services and people working with information, guidance and counselling and advising, should read it and also for sure, when they read, they can benefit of the results. Arielle and Imre, are there something that you would like to say? We are getting closer to the end of the podcast. So is there something that you would like to still say about the project design or about your work or service design? You can, for example, start.

Arielle Tye
No, I don't think there's anything really to add.

Mika Pietilä
Is there, Imre, something that you would like to still say and add?

Imre Simon
I would encourage the listeners to follow up on the developments of the design projects? As I said, it's a question of a couple of months and everything will be ready and public. So I suggest they follow up on this, either on the websites or social media channels of Eryica or any of the partner organisations, including the Koordinaatti and Promo Cymru. We will all disseminate the results. And these are the results of this project. And I encourage everyone to check it and incorporate it in their work whenever it is relevant.

Mika Pietilä
Thank you and thank you both Imre and Arielle for participating Koordinaatti podcast. We will for sure share this podcast so that youth workers, people working with youth information and in the youth field generally can listen to this podcast and benefit from the discussion and also get to know the design project and its outputs. Thank you to all listeners and have a nice day.