Have you ever thought about becoming a mentor yourself or are you looking for one?
On Wednesday 4 May we hosted a ‘Mentoring Special’ session online with an expert panel.
Our panellists
Katherine Snow
Katherine is a Senior Service Designer at Sopra Steria, where she supports Government organisations to navigate change and complexity. She is an interdisciplinary designer with a background in Design Anthropology, Design Research, and Product Design. Her focus lies in exploring the process from strategy to reality: developing bespoke project-specific tools to enable individuals or organisations to engage with possible futures. Katherine has worked with start-ups, Higher Education, the private and public sector.
Jana Mizutyte
Jana is a Junior Service Designer at Disclosure Scotland. After earning a bachelor degree in Product Design Jana found her way to Disclosure Scotland where she tried many hats and developed passion for safeguarding and improving public services. This ultimately led her to kick start her career in Service Design and work on creating sustainable public services that align with user needs.
Kirsty Sinclair
Kirsty is a lead service designer in the Scottish Government where she works on democratising design skills, right now for those connected to children’s social care services. Her personal and professional interests in mentoring led her to co-found mega mentor in 2020. With 150+ design mentors, its aim is to increase diversity in design leadership.
Connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter @kirsty_joan
Jen Thomson
Jen currently works as a Senior Interaction Designer at Ministry of Justice, designing software and services to improve the justice system. She is a multidisciplinary designer with a long history in user centred design in public sector, startups and SMEs. A self confessed people person and problem-solver, Jen has mentored and trained many early career designers.
Connect on LinkedIn or on Twitter @lilmisstee
Growing a service designer: Mentoring as co-experience
Talk by Katherine and Jana. They will present it again during the UCD Gathering Conference.
After a year of mentoring, Katherine and Jana as mentor and mentee, shared their experience of the mentoring relationship from both perspectives – sharing their learnings and approaches.
They discussed how the exchange of dialogue in mentoring presents an opportunity for removing barriers into design careers (particularly within Service Design) and how building an organisational cultural shift towards a mentoring mindset can enable us all to be better design practitioners.
The slides of the presentation were shared, you can access them.
Mega Mentor
Kirsty told us about Mega Mentor, how the project started and where they are hoping to improve it. Have a look and register if you want to become a mentor.
Panel discussion
Our 4 panellists answered questions from the audience and from a board created prior to the event.
Links shared during the session
Two more mentoring websites:
And a lot of discussions about Myers and Briggs 16 personalities types. A lot of the attendees seemed to be one of the rare type: Advocate. Could it be more frequent in designers? More research needed 😉
UCD Gathering conference
I’f you’ve missed this session, you can see Katherine and Jana’s talk (and many more!) at the UCD Gathering conference on the 8 and 9 June. Book your tickets and don’t forget to use the code 10MUAW to get 10% off.