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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...
Flow, Paper, and the Metaphors We Manage By
During ethnographic observation on the ward, something small kept catching my attention: the doctors' notebooks. Not the electronic patient record, not the digital dashboard on the screen at the...
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...
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.
Situational Mapping for Service Design: From Frame Analysis to Design Method
The previous post traced connections between three uses of "frame" - Fillmore's linguistic frames, Goffman's situational frames, and Dorst's design frames - and concluded by noting that framing as a...
Three Frames: Fillmore, Goffman, and Dorst on Structure and Meaning
The word "frame" appears across multiple intellectual traditions, each using it to describe how structure shapes meaning and possibility. In the previous post, I explored how Fillmore's case grammar...
Case Grammar and Service Semantics: Toward a Richer Vocabulary for Action
In the previous post, I argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable, is incomplete. Verbs alone cannot capture the material infrastructure, institutional rules, practice...
Beyond 'Good Services Are Verbs': Theoretical Foundations and Critical Limitations
The "good services are verbs, bad services are nouns" heuristic - first articulated by Lou Downe at GDS in June 2015 - has become a powerful design principle across UK government and beyond. Yet this...
Motivation as Vector
The previous post concluded that the Motivational Design Framework lacked a unifying architecture - that the synthesis of SDT, discrepancy theory, ARCS, flow, and Dreyfus was ad hoc rather than...
Motivational Design Revisited: What Remains
The first post laid out what the thesis was - its framework, its psychological sources, the moment it emerged from. The second examined what happened when the framework met reality: the case study...