DesignOps Global Conference 2022

Presenter Profile: Sarah is the Chief Digital Officer for Northgate Public Services and CEO of Snook.  She is a designer and serial idea generator. She co-founded Snook, MyPolice, CycleHack, Dearest Scotland, Alloa Pride and The Matter. For this work she was awarded a Google Fellowship for her work in technology and democratic innovation and named as Good magazine’s 100 extraordinary individuals tackling global issues in creative ways. Sarah was given an honorary doctorate from the Glasgow School of Art for services to design in 2019.In 2018 Sarah was named by Nesta and the UK’s mainstream publication the Observer as a New Radical, individuals who are tackling society’s biggest challenges.

Daily, Sarah is the CEO of Snook, an award winning global design consultancy based in London and Glasgow and the Chief Digital Officer of Northgate Public Services, a 2000+ public sector technology firm, supporting the business to design and deliver services fit for the 21st century. Snook are on a mission to design a world that’s more human. 

Sarah is a board member of Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, Addaction a mental health charity and Settle a charity dedicated to tackling the causes of youth homelessness. 

She is a fellow of the RSA, sits on the Mayor of Hackney’s Digital Advisory Board, and is a fellow at the Edinburgh University centre for Service Excellence.

Presentation Title: Designers ≠ User centered organisation  

Outline: Everyone of us designs on a daily basis. Our everyday micro decisions add up to the overall experience our users have. Whether it’s how you finance the products, what your outcome measurements are to what your staff deliver on the ground, we all impact the user experience. It’s easy to believe that the size of your team and design system is a measure of how much your organisation has invested in design. But when you look beyond the invisible boundaries of your team and platforms, does everyone in the business really have a literacy of what good products and services look like?

Sarah will talk through her experience as CEO of Snook and her framework for embedding design. Working with major retailers like Tesco to charities like Addaction and public bodies including Loch Lomond and Trossachs National Park, she’ll share strategies on how to embed design literacy and practice across the business.

And as a new CDO of a major 2000+ public technology firm, she’ll share her plans for building design practice at scale in delivering more inclusive, accessible and user centered services, where it’s all a relationship game.

Company Website: https://wearesnook.com