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Recent Weeknotes
Blog style notes and reflections on public sector design, product development, and research.
Verbs, Nouns, and the Hierarchy of Action in Service Design
Duncan Stephen's recent post, "Services are verbs combined with nouns", addresses the nouns, verbs best way to describe service ontologies problem, and which I also wrote about in states and services...
Promises, Affordances, and What Services Actually Are
The Design Systems Working Group has been developing a hierarchy of service patterns - from policy down to pixels, mapping how the data products products relate to broader service journeys. That work...
Mapping the System
This week's focus was on synthesis: taking the observations, interviews, and documentary analysis from recent weeks and developing representations that could communicate the complexity of ward-based...
States and Services
I've been mapping a data access service - tracing how requests move through the system, where data gets duplicated, transformed, or lost as users progress. The conventional service design toolkit...
When the Prototype or Live Service is the Only Documentation
This week has been focussed on modelling the data flows and service logic for the registration process that sits between two NHS services: the Data Access Request Service (DARS) and the Secure Data...
What 'Registration' Actually Means
This week I began work on what is called the 'registration' part of the NHS Secure Data Environment service. The first thing I inherited was a business process model, produced by a colleague, mapping...
Career Timeline
A visual overview of my career spanning industrial design, service design, design research, and digital product development.
Research Updates
Updates and deeper articles and reflections from my (very) part-time PhD in design research at Linköping University.
Owning the Problem Space: Lessons for Practice
Across this series I have developed an argument in three parts: that planning and design are fundamentally different activities, distinguished by whether the problem space within which work proceeds...
Beyond Technomagic: What Military Design Teaches Public Sector Transformation
Throughout this series, I have developed a framework - state spaces, the planning/design distinction, grammars, constraints - and applied it to the conceptual infrastructure of service design. This...
Frugal Algorithms and Communities of Practice
The preceding posts in this series developed a theoretical apparatus - state spaces, grammars, the planning/design distinction - and sketched, in the grammar post, what a compositional approach to...
Toward a Grammar of Services
The previous posts in this arc have surveyed different approaches to systematic design. Wilkinson's (2005) Grammar of Graphics demonstrated that a formal grammar - a vocabulary, a set of...
Service Patterns: From GOV.UK to Holliday
The previous post examined Brad Frost's Atomic Design - a hierarchical approach to composing user interfaces from atoms through to pages - and the post before that explored Wilkinson's Grammar of...
Atomic Design: Frost's Compositional Hierarchy
The previous post examined Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics - a formal system for specifying statistical visualisations through composition of fundamental elements. Wilkinson showed that a creative...