Planning and Design
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.
Conceptual Foundations
- 1
What I Learned From a PhD Module in Machine Learning
June 15, 2023
Three things converged during my time at SCÖ, a Swedish coordination association for vocational rehabilitation, that set the direction for this series. Each pointed toward the same underlying...
- 2
Objects, Entities, and Things: What Services Act Upon
June 23, 2023
The previous post introduced domain engineering - the design work of constructing the representational infrastructure that computational systems presuppose - and identified it as the series' central...
- 3
Events, Lives, and Systems: The Subject Matter of Public Services
June 29, 2023
The previous post established what kinds of objects public services engage with - patients, cases, assessments, entitlements, relationships - and the different ways those objects can be defined, from...
- 4
From Cognitive Frameworks to Geometric Formalism
July 3, 2023
The previous posts in this series established that services involve objects with properties, events that change those properties, and systems in which those events unfold. The next question is...
- 5
Conceptual Spaces: The Geometry of Meaning
July 6, 2023
The previous post surveyed competing frameworks for representing knowledge - distributed cognition, activity theory, social representations, prototype theory - and argued that Gärdenfors's conceptual...
- 7
Graphs and Service Representations: What Blueprints and Journey Maps Conceal
July 16, 2023
The previous post explored state spaces geometrically - as coordinate systems with dimensions, where trajectories trace paths through abstract space. This post approaches state spaces from a...
- 8
Promise Theory: A Grammar of Cooperation
July 20, 2023
The previous posts - particularly Conceptual Spaces, What is a State Space?, and Graphs and Service Representations - have explored state spaces: what they are, how they are constructed, and how they...
- 9
The Reification Gap: How Institutional Governance Transforms Design Understanding
February 21, 2026
Gedenryd (1998) identified a fundamental discrepancy in design methodology: a gap between "the received, theoretical views of how things ought to work, and how they have turned out to work in reality...
- 10
Thinking in Services: Iqbal's Programmatic Grammar
July 25, 2023
The previous post introduced Promise Theory - Mark Burgess's framework for understanding cooperation between autonomous agents. Promises are voluntary commitments; services are networks of kept...
- 12
Statecharts: Visual Formalism for Complex Systems
August 4, 2023
The previous posts have built up a layered picture: state spaces as the foundation for reasoning about systems; conceptual spaces as geometric vector spaces for representing meaning; graphs as the...
- 13
Service States: From Shostack to NATO
August 9, 2023
The previous post introduced statecharts - David Harel's visual formalism for reactive systems, providing a rigorous notation for states, transitions, hierarchy, and concurrency. Statecharts...
Planning and Design
- 14
Boundary Objects and the Limits of Making Visible
August 18, 2023
The previous posts have established a framework: conceptual spaces as geometric vector spaces for representing meaning, state spaces as formal models of possible configurations, and various tools for...
- 15
What is Planning? A Computational View
August 24, 2023
The previous posts built up conceptual foundations: conceptual spaces, state spaces, promises, grammars, statecharts, service states, and boundary objects. Now we can address the question that...
- 16
Planning vs Design
September 1, 2023
The previous post presented planning as a computational problem: navigation within a state space. The key insight was that planning presupposes a domain model - what the series calls domain...
- 17
Representations: Product Management vs Service Design
September 11, 2023
The previous posts developed a conceptual apparatus - state spaces, planning, design, grammars - and established the distinction between constructing a domain and navigating within one. This post...
Grammars and Patterns
- 18
The Grammar of Graphics: Wilkinson's Contribution
September 20, 2023
The previous post contrasted product management and service design representations, finding that neither tradition has explicit state models, formal transition specifications, or generative grammars;...
- 19
Atomic Design: Frost's Compositional Hierarchy
September 26, 2023
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...
- 20
Service Patterns: From GOV.UK to Holliday
October 4, 2023
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...
- 21
Toward a Grammar of Services
October 13, 2023
This post was originally written in October 2023. It has since been revised to add the "Decomposition Is Not Grammar" section, examining what the six originally proposed structural components achieve...
Implications
- 22
Frugal Algorithms and Communities of Practice
October 19, 2023
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...
- 23
Beyond Technomagic: Domain Understanding and the Governance Structures That Prevent It
October 27, 2023
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...
- 24
The Politics of Formalism: Why the Choice of Algorithm Matters
November 24, 2023
The previous posts in this series built a formal apparatus - conceptual spaces, state spaces, graphs, promises, statecharts, grammars - and then applied it to a critique of public sector...
- 25
Owning the Problem Space: Lessons for Practice
November 1, 2023
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...
Extensions
- 26
Four Kinds of Event: Harel, Gärdenfors, Iqbal, and Burgess on What Happens in Services
November 15, 2024
This post was originally written in November 2024. It has since been revised to include cross-references to the companion Language, Frames, and Domain Understanding series - on case grammar,...
- 27
Beyond 'Good Services Are Verbs': Theoretical Foundations and Critical Limitations
July 5, 2025
This series explores how linguistic structure shapes the way both human designers and computational agents understand and describe the abstract entities that services are. The connection to the...
- 28
When Nouns Surface as Verbs: Denominal Conversion and Service Naming
July 8, 2025
The previous post argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable as a corrective to bureaucratic naming, obscures as much as it reveals. The noun/verb distinction in service...
- 29
Case Grammar and Service Semantics: Toward a Richer Vocabulary for Action
July 12, 2025
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...
- 30
Three Frames: Fillmore, Goffman, and Dorst on Structure and Meaning
July 19, 2025
The word "frame" appears across multiple intellectual traditions, each using it to describe how structure shapes meaning and possibility. In the domain engineering vocabulary, frames are domain...
- 31
Situational Mapping for Service Design: From Frame Analysis to Design Method
July 26, 2025
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...
- 32
Knowledge Graphs and Service Design: From Linearised Maps to Relational Infrastructure
August 2, 2025
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...
Reflections
- 34
Four Senses of State Space
February 3, 2024
Working through the formal apparatus, the institutional critique, and the politics of formalism, it becomes apparent that the concept of "state" in "state space" has been operating across the series...
- 35
State-Space Construction as Design Inquiry
January 10, 2025
The statechart work on a data access service a few months ago was clarifying in ways I did not expect. Applying Harel's formalism to a real service - mapping its states, transitions, preconditions -...
- 36
Does Formalisation Resist or Produce Reification?
August 8, 2025
I have been making two arguments simultaneously, and I am increasingly aware that they pull in different directions. The first argument, developed across the formal apparatus posts and the statechart...