Welcome to fergusbisset.com
This site supports my work as a service and product designer in the public sector and as a part-time PhD researcher at Linköping University - which are, in practice, the same activity at different depths. The weeknotes are generally shorter reflections on my practical and professional design work inside the public sector organisations I've worked in over the last twenty years; the research updates are longer pieces where the same questions get more theoretical treatment. Both serve as a way of thinking through ideas by writing them down - testing arguments, tracing connections, and exploring the role of design in public sector organisations a research-informed way. Hope you find something interesting, and please get in touch via LinkedIn if you want to discuss more.
Recent Weeknotes
Blog style notes and reflections on public sector design, product development, and research.
The Excel Test
A small exchange in the team chat this week crystallised something I've been pondering for a while now.
Service Patterns and the Limits of UI Design
A few months into building components for the design system, I keep returning to a question that predates the code: what are these components actually for? Components are for building interfaces, but...
Broken Promises and the Visibility of Failure
If services are fundamentally promise-based systems - where capabilities promise performance and resources promise affordance - what happens when promises break? And more troublingly: what happens...
Events - Happenings, Conditions, or Both?
My design systems framework includes events as one of eight core elements, defined following Gärdenfors (2014) as atomic cause-effect triggers with a force vector and a result vector. This definition...
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...
Do We Need the Product/Service Distinction?
Building a design systems framework for data platform products, I keep running into the same architectural decision: should the framework distinguish products from services - and if so, how?
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.
The Reification Gap: How Institutional Governance Transforms Design Understanding
In an earlier post, I discussed Gedenryd's (1998) identification of a fundamental discrepancy in design methodology: the gap between "the received, theoretical views of how things ought to work, and...
Translating Between Worlds: Boundary Objects in Programme Management
The previous post argued that service design offers programme management cultures three things they cannot generate from their own logic: the cross-cutting view, the surfacing of invisible decisions,...
What Service Design Actually Offers Programme Management
Programme management operates through decomposition. A large initiative is broken into programmes; programmes are broken into projects; projects are broken into workstreams; workstreams are broken...
Knowledge Graphs and Service Design: From Linearised Maps to Relational Infrastructure
Two years ago, I wrote a post in this series arguing that service design's dominant tools - journey maps and service blueprints - are constrained graphs. They flatten relational structure, suppress...
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...