Service design postgraduate personal statement example

Personal statement example

My degree trained me to make things look clear. My final-year project taught me that clarity is often the least of a person's problems. I had planned to redesign the appointment letters and signage for a community dental service near my university, working with a practice manager who agreed to speak with me a few times over the spring. I produced a letter template, a wayfinding scheme and a simple leaflet about what to expect at a first visit. When I tested the letter with eight people in the waiting room, six of them understood it easily, but four still told me they had almost missed the appointment, because the phone line to change a date was only staffed in the morning and they worked shifts. My beautiful letter was not the obstacle. That project is the reason I am applying for a master's in service design rather than looking for a studio job.

Since graduating I have worked part-time as a customer advisor for a housing association, handling repairs reports and rent queries. It is ordinary work, but it has been the most useful education I could have arranged. I now know what a badly designed service feels like from inside it: the tenant who has explained the same leak three times, the contractor system that will not accept an appointment window a person can actually keep, the internal script that asks me to confirm details the caller has already typed into the online form. I have started keeping notes on where the same problem recurs, and last year I was asked to help a colleague test new wording for the out-of-hours repairs message. We drafted three versions, tried them on twelve callers over a fortnight and chose the one that produced the fewest follow-up calls. It was a small piece of work with a modest result, and I am not going to pretend it transformed the department, but it showed me how much can be learned by changing one thing carefully and watching what happens.

In my own time I have been teaching myself the tools of the field, mostly by using them. I have blueprinted the journey of reporting a communal lighting fault at work, including the back-stage steps the tenant never sees, and found six handovers between four systems. Reading has helped me put language to this: Lou Downe's Good Services gave me a framework for judging whether a service does what people expect of it, and Kimbell's writing on service design as a practice made me more careful about claiming that a designer can simply redesign an organisation from the outside. I am interested in the governance question that follows from this. Who owns a service once the designer leaves, and what does a blueprint need to contain to survive a staff change?

I also volunteer at a Saturday repair café, where I look after the intake sheet that matches broken items to available fixers. It is a tiny service with three volunteers and a church hall, and it still has queues, unmet expectations and a handover problem at midday. Redesigning the sheet so fixers could see the waiting list at a glance cut the standing around considerably. I like that scale of problem and I like working with the people who deliver the thing.

What I want from postgraduate study is rigour: research methods I can defend, experience of working with real organisations under supervision, and critique from people who will tell me when a prototype is answering the wrong question. I expect to work in the public or non-profit sector afterwards, ideally somewhere I can stay long enough to see whether a change actually held.

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