Sharanya Ramesh

A Service Designer by profession and storyteller at heart, I come from a background of design, having played User Experience Consultant and Project Managerial roles across sectors and industries in her previous professional experience. All my life, I've been fascinated with the stories of people, of places and of moments. My heritage informs my design process and makes me unique, with a power to inform any narrative that I am part of.

I have conducted multiple design thinking workshops, worked with multidisciplinary teams across borders and has also been an ambassador for Design For Change, India. I believe that the people and systems that I design for hold unique positions to enrich systems due to the power of their lived experiences.This has fuelled my passion for organisational design that enables community-led innovation.

I think that my role as a service designer is to create space for, or identify opportunities to ignite the flame in communities of people to shape their ecosystems in a world where accessibility comes at a premium.

To know more, visit my portfolio on: www.sharanya-ramesh.com

To schedule a meet and greet, you can book a 30 minute chat here

SEED: Shaping the Learning Environment in an Organisation

I recently wrapped up a project with my colleague, Yu-Hsuan Ho, on creating ways for people to shape the learning environments in their organisation. SEED is a hybrid of tools and services for delivery teams and employees to engage with new practices by targeting the phases of learning and trying to alleviate the needs of the employees and delivery teams in the public sector.

Visit my profile below to know more about SEED.

"What we choose to design and more importantly, what we choose not to design and, even more importantly, who we exclude from the design process—these are all political acts" - Mike Monteiro

An example of a piece of work I am passionate about was a recent project done with Fair By Design to bring the voices of lived experience to financial regulators through a series of storytelling tools that regulators were comfortable using and outcomes that could grow with the client.

Get to know me:

• CURRENTLY BASED IN.. London

• CURRENTLY READING: Lord of The Rings, Good Services by Lou Downe

• CURRENTLY LISTENING TO: The Poisoner's Cabinet, NatGeo Overheard

• FAVOURITE ARTIST(S): Dire Straits and Basquiat

• WHEN I'M NOT WORKING I'M .. Breathing in the wonderful outdoors, doodling and being a very indulgent plant mom

• MY SIDE HUSTLES : Illustrations and started a podcast named 'Sinister Origins'. Find us soon on Spotify!

• FAVOURITE MEAL: My mum's curd rice (A wonderful South Indian dish of yoghurt, tempered spices and rice. Love it with a dash of my grandma's pickle)

SEED in a frame

An overview of our tools

SEED is a hybrid of tools and services for delivery teams and employees to engage with new practices by targeting the phases of learning and trying to alleviate the needs of the employees and delivery teams in the public sector.

Brief description

The public sector aims to meet the needs of the communities.

By embedding and learning new practices, the public sector can achieve their goal in a more efficient way. We believe there is a need for organisations to learn, to address changing needs in the most effective manner. In this project, we are sowing the seeds of transformation through engaged learning, so that learning can be prioritised in the organisation.

We did this project by co-creating our solutions with many key players in the public sector.

To know more, visit our website

Why Learning?

“The problem is, you walk away and [the learning] doesn’t embed”

We initially took a hypothesis driven approach to understand why learnings were not being retained in Councils. We realised that the bigger problem was that learning was not prioritised in councils. Learning not being retained was a consequence of it not being prioritised.

The Need

We start at the heart of the learning ecosystem, with the delivery teams, wanting to deliver learnings, and engaged employees, who are willing to learn and are our changemakers. Engaged employees account for 25% of employees in the public sector.

So our approach was to help these employees to be more involved in their learning, and to aid delivery teams in creating the space for employees to do so. We do this by creating engagement in the learning process.

Our Service, SEED

SEED is a hybrid of online tools and face-to-face services, for delivery teams and employees to engage with new learnings, in order to equip them to shape the learning environment in their organisation. We do this by creating engagement in the learning process.

Our Persona Configuration tools are aimed at easy onboarding of different learning styles. The Question Prompts help learners define their own progress. Learning Groups create communities of reflection within like-minded peers.

The Need — The goal of the council is to meet the needs of the community. Old ways were working, so they didn't have to learn new practices to achieve their goal. But they are time and resource heavy. There is a need for organisations to learn, to address changing needs in the most efficient manner. To meet the needs of the community, the council needs to have effective practices. These effective practices need to be learned and embedded. The first step to this is to ensure learning is prioritised.

The Learning Ecosystem — Needs differ across the learning process. 1. Delivery teams find that they need to be constantly present for any learning to be retained. 2. They need to align to different learning styles for better engagement within a team. 3. Engaged employees seek support to deepen and enrich their learnings. 4. They have different engagement styles, and this affects their agency in learning. 5. They are also keen to find like-minded peers who can learn with them.

SEED in the Learning Process — We consider the individual needs of our users, and create incentives to participate and apply the tools in their respective practices. Our solutions are modular and easy to onboard, keeping in mind individual stakeholder needs. An example: Councils find that teams have little time to get used to the speed of the agile process. Delivery teams can introduce Question Prompts to employees for deeper reflection, and create Learning Groups to build communities of learning.

The Future of SEED — The tools of our service, target interventions across the various learning phases, with different tools targeted for various types of learning. 1. Delivery teams will be able to plan ahead and design courses with this knowledge of the different learning styles. 2. Our question prompts can be used in a team to define the new actions for developing capabilities and reflecting together. 3. Learning Groups can become a regular practice for capability building.

SEED's Impact — When learning is prioritised, those within the organisation can shape their learning environment. When the culture of learning and transformation grows, organisations make a positive shift towards more resilient, proactive ways to meet their community’s needs.

Our conversations with our stakeholders pointed towards ways our solution could grow. The scope of SEED can be widened to create ways for team members to understand each other better, and engage with each other effectively, by targeting team strengths.

Our learning style tools help delivery teams understand the composition of their learning cohort. Delivery teams will be able to plan ahead and design courses with this knowledge of the different learning styles.
The goal of learning in the public sector is to grow capabilities within a larger team, because learning is not isolated to the individual. Our question prompts can be used in a team to define the new actions for developing capabilities and reflecting together. Learning groups can become a regular practice within teams, dedicated to creating a space to develop the capability.
Our learning style guidelines are designed to open lines of conversation between delivery teams and employees.

SEED’s Impact

With our services, we want attitudes towards learning to change.

We aim to do this by creating space to make learning easy, and giving those within the organisation the opportunity to practice and see the value for themselves,

If more and more people see the value of learning, then they begin to prioritise it and learning will gradually become part of the organisation’s DNA .

The people who made SEED — This project was as rewarding as it was challenging. Through our different conversations and interactions, we met a group of people whose valuable participation led us to this point of the project.

Our Journey and Reflections — A look at our rollercoaster journey to get to where we are today.

Special Thanks To…

Thank you to Lisa Jeffrey and her team at GDS, John Mortimer, Sam Villis from Local Digital Gov, Benjamin P Taylor from Red Quadrant, Luke Roberts of Resolve Consultants, the Breakfast Club at OneTeamGov, Jennie Cox from York Council, Jenny Zienau, Sonia Khan and Claudia Knowles from Hackney Council, Tom Alexander, Paul Feven, Jane Kennedy, Tim Aldcroft and Gemma Baldock from Newham Council, Ramesh Sreedharan from Orenda, Vijay Damle from Tata Consultancy Services, David Buck from UK Gov Camp and OneTeamGov and the patrons at Power With, Telescope and Good Innovation.

We would also like to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to our mentor, Judah Armani for his ability to provide us unexplored perspectives and add richness to our work, and Andres Lopez from VISA for inspiring, and being inspired by, our work.

The acknowledgements would go amiss if we did not thank our wonderful tutors at the RCA, our supportive families and our circle of friends who continue to inspire and drive us to our best.

Sharanya Ramesh

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Royal College of Art