Planning and Design
What conceptual apparatus does service design need to engage substantively with algorithmic and agentic technology? A 28-post 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.
- 2
Objects, Entities, and Things: What Services Act Upon
June 23, 2023
The previous post introduced the distinction between planning and design, and the formal apparatus that planning presupposes. In PDDL - the Planning Domain Definition Language used to specify...
- 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 established that services involve objects with properties, events that change those properties, and systems in which those events unfold. The next question is representational: how...
- 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...
- 6
What is a State Space?
July 11, 2023
The previous post showed how concepts can be represented geometrically - as regions in multi-dimensional vector spaces where similarity is distance. This geometric formalism is powerful: it provides...
- 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
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...
- 10
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...
- 11
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
- 12
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...
- 13
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...
- 14
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 - objects, predicates, actions, goals - and...
- 15
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
- 16
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;...
- 17
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...
- 18
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...
- 19
Toward a Grammar of Services
October 13, 2023
The previous posts in this arc have surveyed different approaches to systematic design. Wilkinson's (2005) Grammar of Graphics demonstrated that a formal grammar - a vocabulary, a set of...
Implications
- 20
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...
- 21
Beyond Technomagic: What Military Design Teaches Public Sector Transformation
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...
- 22
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...