Human Centered Career Design: an interview with Gerry Scullion of This is Doing

Gerry is the Founder and CEO of This is Doing and This is HCD - two organisations that produce content and events allowing people to come together and learn about areas of service design, customer experience, design thinking, product management and user experience. Gerry also educates organisations about how to use Design to enable human-led (and most importantly Earth-led) innovations to occur. He has had a design career spanning 18 years across Australia, New Zealand, and Ireland, and he hosts the popular podcast Bringing Design Closer. We caught up with Gerry at home in Dublin to ask him about three key points:

• What Human Centred Design is, exactly, and how it can be applied to #careerexploration;
• What his career trajectory has been like, and how he crafted a work life he loves wholeheartedly;
• What he thinks the #futureofwork in Design looks like, and how human centred design can be taught (if it can!)

You can read the full interview below or watch a short snippet from our Xperienceships Thought Leadership Youtube channel below.

Xperienceships: For those that might be reading this and have no idea what service design or Human Centered Design is, could you give us a short intro?

 Gerry: As the alignment of processes, peoples and interaction joins, it helps improve the quality of the output of the products and services. So it's not just looking at a digital app or a website, and thinking that that could solve the world's problems. It looks at the more holistic approach, the broader ecosystem, or the systems thinking perspective of things.

If you were to describe us to people in consultancies, they call it a process or a framework that people would move through and create new products and services. But for me, it has always been a mindset of doing no harm and trying to do good and not kind of contributing to the destruction of the world and the earth. So it's much more trying to enable people to empower people to do good in the world, as opposed to working for large tech companies and creating poor behaviours.

X: A more personal question: we would like to know what kind of career experiences prepared you for the job that you have today? And if any of those formed during your formal education. 

G: I did a podcast on this called Getting Started in Design. People reached out to me because of the podcasts saying, hey, I'm thinking of getting into design and so forth. And I can only look at my own trajectory in my own career to see how much value I got out of my formal education. I did a four year degree in Industrial Design and post that degree, I was kind of left to my own devices, I felt like I’d been left behind. And I had no one to turn to. I started just going to find my way into the world of web design and UX design at that time. None of us was taught that at university. I was probably maybe a decade out of university and I was like, actually, I now I kind of know what I need to do. And the kind of experiences that I had that led me to that point. Ever seen the movie The Shawshank Redemption?

There's a bit where Andy Dufresne has been in prison for so long and he has to swim the pipe to get his freedom. At the very end of it, he's got his arms in the air and he rips off his clothes. And he's swum through four kilometres to get his freedom. And that pipe is what I would consider a career to get to the point where I am. People say: no more of this, this is not doing anyone any good. 

People start to question everything in their mid 30s onwards. They're saying, I'm either burnt out, or I just don't want to do this anymore, or I only want to contribute to things that improve the world and my own life. So I've gone through lots of different realms in my career. The last decade has been really about me taking full control and owning my own business, selecting the projects that I want to work on, and really helping and stepping up to leadership and actually helping them do their jobs better. And building trust with organizations. That's kind of what I do for a living. None of this is on paper. In fact, if you go to my own website, it's very hard to articulate what I do. And, of course, none of this was taught in my four years in university, and it's all been learned on the job, so to speak.

I did industrial design, which was the blending of design and engineering. And you know, we were designing cars, and all the fun sexy stuff in university. And then I got my first job: it was designing a battery pack. I remember I was looking at this plastic mold to hold four AA batteries. And they were going to sell two or three million of them. I am literally designing something that is going to have an experience that lasts a second and will end up in a landfill. I was 23 or 22 years old. I didn’t really feel good about this. There was no value. But plastic was the cheapest way, and I was a young graduate out of college and I was grateful for the job. But I realized at that point very quickly that that's not what I want to do. I don't want to create a product that's going to end up in a landfill. 

Conversely to this I won the RSA student design award in 2002 which gave me a bursary to travel to Australia. I started to question things. You’re meant to use the bursary fund for the betterment of your career, and I had to write a report when I came back and they said, “so how did you get on Gerry with your travel?” And I go, “I realized I don't want to do it anymore”. I was like: “but I know what I want to do now”. And that's much more powerful. I was learning about human computer interaction, or HCI, and usability testing and making things easier for people to use, and accessibility. I was reading all those kind of books - like Steve Krug back in the day. And I just realized that I didn't want to be part of that system anymore. I thought digital was a much better medium because we didn't have to waste paper but it's since transpired that digital is probably just as destructive to the earth.

We have a good podcast about that on thisishcd called world wide waste with Gerry McGovern, everyone should listen to it and read his book.

X: You have spoken passionately about describing service design as “a thing of beauty or an orchestration about breaking designs to make them better”. We loved that approach. If individuals were to take this service design approach to their career development, where would we start by breaking the design to make it better?

G: It's a really interesting one. When I spoke about that it was more in the context of services that are fundamentally broken. Sometimes it's better just to start again. And what tends to happen in businesses is they invest in technology quicker than they invest in design, and they'll see the technical solution and they just keep on adding and adding and adding and adding like, there's one or two banks that I know that - and I won't name them - but I know for a fact that the development teams haven't a clue how some of the things work, because there's just been so much technology layered upon technology. Sometimes it's really better to start again, and go back to basics and really focus on what you're trying to do. 

It was just over the last decade that I took a step back, and really reflected on my own career. I remember on my way to Australia, after winning that student Design Award, I went to Thailand for a month. There's only about two things I remember about the month in Thailand, one of them was reading a book and the other one was sitting on the beach. Everything else was a blur. But the book was called What Color is Your Parachute? It's a career book. I remember right doing some of the exercises on it and writing that by the age of 30 I wanted to be working on a beach with a laptop. It's so cheesy, but by the age of 30, I was working on the beach in Bondi. What I was really alluding to was freedom and being able to work for myself and have control. It's so important. It's so much harder doing this than it is working for somebody else: you know, you're going to get paid every month. You're going to do all these different things. You're going to get training budgets, you're going to get sick days. But all of it it's worth it for me because I've got the flexibility and I know what's important to me. Family is important to me. Spending time with my kids every day, picking them up, dropping them off. I didn't want to be one of those parents that was living on my computer to do things. 

So, go back to your point about what people need to do, it's really taking the career second and looking at you as a human being first, what is important to you and putting yourself at the center of the process. So if you know, you really care about the earth, and what you consume, but yet you're working for a gambling company, there's a contradiction because one is highly destructive. So take a step back and look at yourself like ground zero. Build yourself up from that point to enable yourself to become the person that you want to become and allow work to fit around you, as opposed to the other way around.

Here's an interesting story. I started doing chapters this year around the world because there's a big listenership on HCD. There's about eight or 10 chapters. But the one in Sydney is an interesting story. I had this random email in my inbox asking “can you meet?” I was like, okay, I'll meet. I always try and make time, I'll always do my best. I went along and I met this person and her name was Rebecca, and she said: "look, I really want to do it. I'm working for a big consultancy. I don't want to do this for the rest of my life, though". I said, "how old are you?" She’s 25.

I said, "I wish I had something to give you that would really enable you to, to create your own career. The only place that I know that you could potentially do this was General Assembly/ Academy XI in Sydney and they do courses. It's expensive to do, but you can go and do it. I'll meet you for another coffee in another two weeks". We went off for another coffee. I said, “how did you get on with your exercises?” She said: “great, I quit my job, bought a ticket to Australia and I paid for General Assembly and I'm like, you are joking me! I felt emotionally responsible. I was saying to my wife that night: “oh my god, what happens if this doesn't work out for this person”? 

We just had Rebecca on the podcast talking about that. She is now the chapter lead of This is HCD in Sydney: now the global chapter lead actually, as of today. She's so passionate about human centered design. And I've just basically helped and have conversations and supported. But that means so much, because I remember what it was like when I left university, I had no one.

X: How do you think education institutions could start to use Human Centered Design to support learners in early professional exploration?

If I was a business, and it was a business decision to send somebody in for a four year degree, and then you looked at me, you know, as I haven't used any of that information in my own day to day career, you probably say it wasn't a good business decision. But at the same time, what it did teach me was resilience. It taught me to stick at something. And you know, I didn't learn that much about design, believe it or not in my Design degree. I learned design by doing design.

I'm not entirely sure you can teach Human Centered Design in a formal sense. You can expose people to different things because people respond to certain circumstances. The moment that I was like, actually this is much more of the kind of work that I want to do, was working for Cochlear back in Australia - a biomedical engineering company, they create and help restore hearing, one of the most profound businesses on the planet. It’s hugely important technology and gives people the power to hear again. And I was like, this is this is better than designing any banking app. This is better than designing a suite or mortgage application process.

Can you teach Human Centered Design? Some people just look at it as a framework. I look at it as a mindset. And I don't know how you could potentially teach that mindset. Teaching design in general could be completely rethought and could be a lot more hands-on and could bring the other ecosystems in like different types of businesses, so people can learn on the job and people can get exposed to different areas. 

Whenever I've led teams, it's always important to really focus on the people. It's the people that do the skills and if you just focus on the skills and say, this is how you do things better, it's not really focusing on the person. It’s what separates us from robots. We have to focus on people, making sure that they feel safe and included and heard and listened to and empowered. These are things that, you know, I rarely see in organizations.

Educational institutions have a responsibility to help to cultivate the local design community as well, because too often organizations or institutions develop skills that are beyond the remit and the locale, in terms of their design maturity, and they exit university or institution, and they can't get jobs and they're forced to go overseas. 

X: Can we teach for the future?

G: When I was working for Myspace back in the day, I had a really good friend called Cam Shay, who's the editor of IGN, a gaming website online. Brilliant guy, big long beard, wore baggy trousers every day and got to play computer games every day. I remember he used to say, come on upstairs and play FIFA and tell us what you think of the game. And I'm like, "Oh, this is so good. Do you get to do this every day for your job?"

"Yeah, I write reviews. And it's great. Because my teachers told me I was a loser, and I was never going to amount to anything and wasting my time playing computer games, all the traditional things that you'd imagine a teacher to say. Now, look at me now. I'm playing computer games."

This guy's so intelligent. He said: “If I’d listened to my teachers, I wouldn't be in this job”. I was like, you are so right. And it was one of those moments where I was like, actually, this is how we teach for the future. And what I keep on coming back to is the ability to react to change. That's the only thing we can potentially teach. Because if things are set in their ways and stable, they're not going to be able to build the resilience and they're not be able to grow as individuals.

X: How could we think of human centered career services for students? 

G: I keep on going back to the point that we could be potentially creating, say doctors who don't have enough empathy, or we could be creating engineers that aren't really meant to be engineers, because they're just being put through the process and they haven't been given the opportunity to really explore a career that they really want to do. And that results in later life that they haven't taken control early enough. They hit 40, and they're like, it's too late for me to change. That's when you're stuck in your ways: “I can't go back to university, I'll be the oldest one in the class.” And it's really teaching at a very young age that it's okay to change.

It's even before they get into university, it's at school. It’s making sure that they're ok with choosing learning paths that may not have a job at the end of it. But it really works towards their own personal development, like the arts, philosophy, these things are really important, but they're never pushed. Fine Arts: hugely important. Music: hugely important in society and culture. If we're not investing in these kinds of industries, we're doing ourselves a huge disservice, we're going to end up being robots, cyborgs, no personality and no emotion and our ability and capability to express ourselves. So it's really embracing the huge potential in the individual to become the person that they want to become.