Service Design Training

Gerry Scullion is one of the most influential voices in human-centered design today. As founder of The Human Centered Design Network, he built the world's number-one Human Centered Design podcast — downloaded over 1.1 million times and heard in more than 140 countries — and transformed it into a thriving global community of designers, changemakers, and leaders committed to putting people first.

His forthcoming book, This is Human Centered Design, published by BIS Publishers, distils over two decades of frontline practice into a definitive guide for anyone serious about designing services and experiences that truly work for people. He also contributed to the landmark This is Service Design Doing (O'Reilly, 2018), authoring chapters on effective prototyping and embedding service design teams within organisations. He is the creator of the Service Design for Executives course on Pluralsight.

Through his consultancy Humana Design (trading as This is HCD), Gerry designs and delivers transformative training programmes for organisations across the globe. His clients include the Digital Government Authority of Saudi Arabia, Elexon, Accenture, EY, PwC, Dublin City Council, NSW Government, Victoria State Government, Trust Housing Scotland, and MYOB, among many others.

Gerry is deeply committed to social impact. He has partnered with the Irish Cancer Society on pro bono service design work, helping reshape how the organisation supports people through some of life's most difficult journeys. He has held the role of Councillor for Ireland with the Service Design Network and served as NSW Convenor for the Royal Society of Arts.

He lives near the sea in Clontarf, Dublin, with his wife, two young children, and one very lucky dog. In his spare time, he daydreams, perfects his barista skills, flies drones, grows vegetables, and plays ukulele and guitar — often not all at once.

Avril Copeland brings a rare combination of clinical expertise and digital health innovation to her role as Business Development Director. A qualified physiotherapist (BSc, RCSI), exercise scientist (BSc, Belmont University, USA), and holder of a Certificate in AI in Healthcare from Stanford University, Avril bridges the worlds of healthcare, technology, and human-centred design with natural fluency.

As founder and CEO of Innerstrength Ltd., she built and led a digital health company focused on chronic disease management — securing investment, forging strategic partnerships with healthcare professionals and patient organisations, and driving the product from ideation through to acquisition. Following Innerstrength's acquisition by Uniphar PLC, Avril joined the senior leadership team of the Product Access division, reporting directly to the Chief Commercial Officer and playing a key role in developing Uniphi, a platform optimising pharmaceutical logistics and compassionate use programmes across 160 countries.

Her project experience spans major clients including Pfizer, the NHS (children with long-term conditions), and Uniphar, where she consistently combines user research, co-design, and clinical insight to deliver outcomes that are both evidence-based and genuinely people-centred. Earlier in her career, Avril worked as a physiotherapist at Beaumont Hospital, Dublin, where she developed the frontline understanding of healthcare workflows that continues to inform her work today.

Dana Chisnell is one of the foremost practitioners of human-centred design in government, with over 33 years of experience transforming the way public services are designed and delivered. At the US Department of Homeland Security, she served as Executive Director for Customer Experience — building a new 40-person CX directorate from scratch, institutionalising human-centred design across eight agencies employing 260,000 people, and establishing formal CX functions across the department through awareness campaigns, training programmes, and embedding design into procurement and performance systems.

Before DHS, Dana served as a Digital Services Expert at the US Digital Service, leading experience research and product management on some of the most sensitive challenges facing the US government, including services at the southern border and the evacuation of Afghanistan. She co-founded the Center for Civic Design in 2013, where she led groundbreaking research on the experience of American voters and originated the Field Guides to Ensuring Voter Intent — work that has shaped election administration reform across the United States.

Dana also designed and launched the Tech Executive Leadership Initiative (TELI) at the National Conference on Citizenship — a programme that prepares technology executives from the private sector to become effective civil servants, now in its sixth cohort. She currently serves as Design Leader in Residence at Bloom Works, focused on extending the impact of human-centred design in government. Her career is defined by a singular conviction: that good design is not a luxury in public services — it is a necessity.

Rachael Dietkus is the founder and Principal Design Strategist at Social Workers Who Design, and one of the world's leading voices at the intersection of trauma-informed practice and human-centred service design. With over 16 years of experience spanning social work, government digital service leadership, and organisational strategy, she brings a distinctive methodology that embeds care, ethics, and psychological safety at the heart of design practice.

At the White House US Digital Service, Rachael pioneered trauma-informed design frameworks for federal agencies — training over 100 practitioners, founding a cross-agency community of practice, and directly improving digital services used by millions of people navigating public benefit systems. She subsequently served as Design Supervisor and Learning & Development Lead at the US Digital Corps (GSA/TTS), guiding early-career designers working on high-stakes public services and advising senior agency leaders on inclusive research and equitable hiring.

Rachael's client work spans organisations including Meta, IDEO, Code for America, Seattle Children's Hospital, the UN, the US Department of Veterans Affairs, the Illinois State Treasurer's Office, and FEMA, where she led the development of a Trauma-Informed Disaster Response Course for federal staff. She holds an MSW from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, is a Certified Clinical Trauma Professional, and is currently completing an MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts and an Expert at the Design Council.

Marc Stickdorn is one of the most recognised figures in service design practice worldwide. He is co-author of This is Service Design Thinking, This is Service Design Doing, and This is Service Design Methods — a trilogy that has helped hundreds of thousands of designers, managers, and public servants adopt human-centred ways of working. He is co-founder and CEO of Smaply, the leading platform for creating, managing, and scaling journey mapping and service design across organisations.

Marc holds a PhD in Information Systems from the University of Nuremberg, with a focus on service design and customer experience research. This research-driven mindset shapes how he works with teams: combining qualitative insight (interviews, observation, co-creation) with quantitative signals (customer feedback, funnel metrics, operational data) to understand what is happening across touchpoints and handovers — and to prioritise and validate improvements with clarity and ownership.

His experience spans public services, travel and tourism, and financial services, including work with Dublin City Council on service architecture and journey governance for an ecosystem of 600+ services serving 1.4 million people. At Smaply, he has supported enterprise clients including Zurich Insurance Group in operationalising end-to-end journey management at scale. Marc is an SDN Accredited Master Trainer and a former Lecturer and Researcher at MCI Management Center Innsbruck, where he led multi-national research projects on service design in tourism. His focus is always the same: building capability, not just creating artefacts.

Alicia Grimes is the founder and director of The Future Kind, a consultancy focused on culture design, innovation, and facilitation. With ten years of experience at the intersection of people, process, and technology, she brings a service design approach to some of the most demanding transformation challenges facing organisations today — and a hard-won understanding of what it takes to make change stick.

As Lead Service Designer and Strategist at SPARCK (the design and innovation arm of BJSS), Alicia led large-scale digital transformation programmes across the UK and internationally, shaping end-to-end employee and customer experiences and building internal design capability within client organisations. Before that, as Design Services Manager for New Zealand Trade and Enterprise's Better by Design programme, she redesigned a government-funded service supporting New Zealand exporters to grow in international markets — overseeing 35+ innovation projects across North and South America, Asia, Australia, and Europe, achieving an average NPS of 10 and directly supporting successful international expansion for over 50 companies.

Earlier in her career, Alicia worked at the UK Design Council on government-backed design programmes tackling complex societal and economic challenges. Her most recent project work includes designing a cohesive global culture for an intelligent automation consultancy following a three-company merger, and a culture and capability transformation programme for ITV's Group Technology function. Across every context, her approach is the same: design frameworks, systems, and skills that are practical, scalable, and grounded in how people actually work.

Caroline Jarrett is the world's leading specialist in forms and survey design — a discipline she has practised, refined, and taught for over 40 years. As the owner of Effortmark Ltd (est. 1994), she helps organisations make their forms easier to complete, their surveys more accurate, and their data more trustworthy, drawing on a uniquely integrated body of knowledge spanning service design, content design, interaction design, user research, and survey methodology.

Caroline is the author of Surveys That Work: A Practical Guide for Designing and Running Better Surveys, and co-author of Forms That Work: Designing Web Forms for Usability and User Interface Design and Evaluation. Her academic background includes an MA in Mathematics from Oxford University, an MBA from the Open University, and a Diploma in Statistics — a combination that gives her both the analytical rigour and the practical empathy to understand where forms and surveys fail people, and why.

Her work spans a remarkable range of clients: NHS Digital, NHS England, the UK Government Digital Service (GDS), the US Department of Homeland Security, Essex County Council, the University of Edinburgh, the European Society of Endocrinology, and the European Microbiological Laboratory, among many others. She is a member of the GDS Design System Advisory Group, a regular contributor to the NHS digital service manual, and a Chartered Engineer. With decades of hands-on practice and a forensic eye for where well-meaning questions go wrong, Caroline is the person you call when the form is the problem.

Claudia Scullion (she/her/good girl) is the Chief Morale Officer and Head of Biscuit Strategy at This is HCD, a role she has held since 2024 with an enthusiasm that borders on alarming.

Prior to joining the organisation, Claudia spent her formative months being an exceptionally fluffy Cavachon puppy, a period she describes as “foundational.” She arrived with zero relevant experience, a very soft coat, and an absolute refusal to sit still during onboarding. She holds no formal qualifications, but considers this a competitive advantage in a sector increasingly drowning in credentials.

Claudia's core competencies include: active listening (especially near the kitchen), rapid user research (sniffing things), and facilitation of difficult conversations (by sitting on someone's foot until they calm down). Her approach to human-centred design is, if anything, more literal than most: she is physically centred on humans at all times, often without consent.

She has attended every team meeting since 2024, contributed meaningfully to zero of them, and remains the only team member who has never once checked her phone during a workshop. Her publications include Sit, Stay, and the acclaimed long-form piece If You're Not Going to Finish That, I Will. She lives in Clontarf, Dublin, and is very lucky indeed.