Scottish Approach to Service Design

Introduction

The vision for the Scottish Approach to Service Design is that the people of Scotland are supported and empowered to actively participate in the definition, design and delivery of their public services (from policy making to live service improvement).

Realising this vision brings together national and local government, health, public bodies, charities and third sector, as well as the private sector, with the people and communities they serve.

It’s important that we:

• collaborate to design and deliver end-to-end service journeys for people
• work together to create the right conditions and shared ways of working necessary for those services to flourish
• make sure our design methods are inclusive and accessible for everyone, so that we encourage, empower and enable everyone to participate in designing the services they need

Service design is a way of approaching change in the public sector when the changes needed are significant – new policy thinking is being developed, a service is being introduced, or a significant transformation of an existing service is needed. For people working on change projects in health and social care renewal, the Scottish Approach to Service Design is one of the methods used in the Scottish Approach to Change, which was launched in 2025.

This publication aims to describe how design and participation can be used to ensure that we don’t just design services in the right ways, but that we design the right services in the first place.