Week 4: Making Maps, Making Sense
This is my journey documenting the Final Major Project (FMP) for my MA Service Design at the University of the Arts London.
Starting to See It
There is something satisfying about mapping. Not immediately, because the early stages of any mapping exercise tend to feel messy and confusing. But at some point, usually when you are not expecting it, the pieces start to connect and something that feels like a tangle of observations becomes a system you can actually see. This week was that moment for me.
Coming out of Week 3 with a (slightly) better understanding of what GLL is trying to do and what kind of questions were worth asking, the natural next step was to dig into structuring the problem space itself. That meant getting into the mapping work in a more intentional way: looking at the stakeholders, the touchpoints, the gaps, and the patterns running through all of them.
Mapping It Out: From Observations to Gaps
The Learn n Link mapping exercise was the first time in this project that I had to be deliberately structured about what I was noticing. Up until this point, a lot of the thinking had been exploratory: reading, asking questions, building context. This exercise asked something different. It asked me to take everything I had gathered and organise it enough to see that patterns could actually emerge.
That shift in mode was harder than I expected. It is one thing to hold a lot of observations loosely and sense that something is there. It is another to commit them to a structure and let that structure show you what they mean.
What came out of it was three threads: a gap between how much interest the programme generates and how many people actually follow through; the absence of a framework for identifying and supporting different kinds of startups; and a mismatch between what founders need and what is currently on offer. On their own, these felt like interesting areas to explore. But the mapping exercise kept pushing me toward the question underneath them: why do these three things exist together?
That question led me to five specific gaps: a Support Structure Gap, an Engagement Gap, a Sustainability Gap, a Positioning Gap, and an Impact Gap (GLL, 2026). What I found most useful about naming them was not the labels themselves but what the naming made visible. As Kalbach (2016) argues, structured mapping surfaces the relationships and tensions that are otherwise difficult to articulate. Once I could see all five alongside each other, it became clear that they are not separate problems. They feed into each other in a way that means addressing one without the others would only shift the issue elsewhere.
That shifted how I am thinking about what comes next. It is not about solving each gap separately. It is about staying aware of how they connect, and letting that shape where I go from here.
The Ecosystem, Mapped
Get Riya Kamdar’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
We also mapped the stakeholder ecosystem around the programme across three layers: micro, covering founders and spaces closest to the programme; meso, covering GLL’s internal structures and leadership; and macro, covering national funders, local councils, and the wider political environment. Mapping this out gave me a much clearer sense of the different aspects the programme has to hold together at once.
How Might We…?
Everything mapped so far has been building toward a question specific enough to be actionable but broad enough to hold the complexity of the brief. The question that feels most grounded is this:
How might we design a service positioning and impact framework that supports GLL’s Social Enterprise Accelerator Programme, define its identity, track its value, and sustain itself?
This breaks into four sub-questions that will shape the interviews, mapping activities, and research approaches going forward:
What is GLL’s programme currently offering, and how is that understood by the founders it works with?
How might the programme structure its support, selection criteria, and impact measurement more effectively?
Where are the key touchpoints in the founder journey, and where do the gaps sit?
Who are the different types of founders the programme serves, and what do their specific needs look like?
The goal is not just to understand what the programme is, but to understand what it needs to become.
References
GLL (2026) Kick-off meeting with GLL team: MA Service Design Tutor and Students. Greenwich Leisure Limited, London.
Kalbach, J. (2016) Mapping Experiences: A Complete Guide to Creating Value Through Journeys, Blueprints, and Diagrams. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media.
Reason, B., Løvlie, L. and Brand Flu, M. (2015) Service Design for Business: A Practical Guide to Optimizing the Customer Experience. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
