These posts are organised into series that trace particular research threads, projects, or lines of inquiry.
What happens when service design meets programme management cultures optimised for accountability and risk reduction? A series on translation, governance, boundary objects, and practical strategies for designers working within programme structures.
What does design require beyond process adherence? A series examining evaluative judgement, cybernetic traditions, and the structural conditions that determine whether iteration is productive or merely fast.
What conceptual apparatus does service design need to engage substantively with algorithmic and agentic technology? A series building from ontological foundations through formal representations and compositional grammars to the implications for practice.
What happens when a designer builds production-quality code and the organisation doesn't know what to do with it? A series tracing the structural position of design work - from prototyping typologies and agile governance through professional jurisdiction and design capture.
Why does service design's ethos-over-expertise model make avoidance so easy to mistake for practice? A series on deflecting up, the problem of starting, and the structural vulnerability of an occupation that differentiates through values rather than demonstrable outputs.
Exploring systems thinking concepts applied to service design practice in public sector contexts.
Revisiting an MPhil thesis on motivational design: the framework and its psychological sources, what happened when it met reality, and what remains after fifteen years of practice.
What can systems psychodynamics - the Tavistock tradition of studying unconscious processes in organisations - offer design researchers working with social and institutional materials?
Exploring how design works with social and organisational materials rather than purely technical ones.
A 10-post narrative arc tracing July 2022 – June 2023, from orientation through disintegration of a federated learning project - and what it revealed about design, visibility, and organisational response.
How do services structure sensory, conceptual, and contextual experience - and whose experience counts? A series drawing on Folkmann, Rancière, and phenomenology to develop an aesthetic vocabulary for service design.