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.
States Not Stages: On Process Reification, Cybernetic Traditions, and the Construction of State Spaces
Jaimes Nel published a post this week - "From GPS to Map & Compass" - proposing what he calls the IO Loop: a model of design and innovation that replaces linear stages with recursive loops between...
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...
Forward Deployed Design
Last week I was asked to scope what it would take to build a React component library for a national healthcare data platform. As I've been writing the scoping document, I keep returning to a tension...
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...
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 Uncalibrated Instrument: Embodiment, Supervision, and the Infrastructure Question
Two distinct research traditions have arrived, by very different routes, at the same insistence: that the designer's body matters. Höök's (2018) somaesthetic interaction design, developed through...
The Compass Unpacked: Seven Accounts of Evaluative Capacity in Design
The previous post explored why design process becomes what Jaimes Nel (2026) calls GPS. Nel's argument is that models like the Double Diamond, originally intended as orientational maps, hardened into...
Bodies of Knowledge: Relationality and Norm-Critical Awareness
The Design in Programme Management series examines how designers navigate the institutional dynamics of programme-led organisations: the epistemological tension, the cross-cutting value proposition,...
Design in Programme Cultures: Idealism, Capture, and What It Costs
This post synthesises the literature on what happens when Design enters programme-management-led organisations - a common scenario, or situation in public sector and healthcare contexts. It draws...
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...
Revisiting the State-Space Apparatus
Three years have passed since the concentrated sequence of posts that built this series' formal apparatus - conceptual spaces, state spaces, graphs, promises, statecharts, service grammar - and...