Matt is a Service Designer in Deloitte Digital’s London, UK firm, specialising in making ideas real. He loves all things practical in the design space: rolling up his sleeves and getting stuck in to find out how things work. Having taken the ‘scenic’ route in his career, Matt has a diverse background from engineering and entrepreneurship to working with the NZ Police designing the firearms amnesty and buyback.
Unfortunately, he moved to the UK 6 months before the COVID-19 crisis kicked off, so has since thoroughly missed the Kiwi sailing, skiing and outdoors. Once restrictions lift, he is looking forward to venturing outside and exploring a bit more of Europe.
In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic changed the world. Across the globe, each country responded in different and unprecedented ways, and with over 6 million cases and c. 130,000 deaths in a population of over 66 million, the United Kingdom was forced to deliver a range of new initiatives as part of its response to the global crisis. One of these was a “moonshot plan” for mass COVID-19 testing. Announced in September 2020 by the UK Prime Minister, the objective of this plan was to increase the UK’s testing capacity from thousands of tests each day to millions a day. Carol, Georgia, and Matt played a major role in designing the UK’s mass rapid testing service as part of the NHS Test and Trace programme, which was rolled out at scale to the UK’s four nations in 2-3 months.
In their talk, Carol, Georgia, and Matt will share their experiences and lessons of being part of one of the UK’s most significant public sector programmes since World War II – from how they embedded a human-centred design approach, with a mix of the Kiwi number 8 wire mentality, into the design and pilot of a core service of the UK’s pandemic response in weeks, and to how they subsequently delivered and scaled the service across the UK.
Learn about some of the techniques they employed as they share examples and anecdotes from their experiences of the frontline to highlight some of the successes and challenges, they encountered through their delivery of the UK’s mass rapid testing service, the first of its kind in the world.
