Systems Thinking for Service Design
Exploring systems thinking concepts applied to service design practice in NHS contexts.
- 1
States and Services
November 8, 2024
I've been mapping a data access service - tracing how requests move through the system, where data gets duplicated, transformed, or lost as users progress. The conventional service design toolkit...
- 2
Promises, Affordances, and What Services Actually Are
June 8, 2025
The Design Systems Working Group has been developing a hierarchy of service patterns - from policy down to pixels, mapping how the data products products relate to broader service journeys. That work...
- 3
Do We Need the Product/Service Distinction?
July 6, 2025
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?
- 4
Verbs, Nouns, and the Hierarchy of Action in Service Design
July 13, 2025
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...
- 5
Events - Happenings, Conditions, or Both?
July 20, 2025
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...
- 6
Broken Promises and the Visibility of Failure
August 3, 2025
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...
- 7
Service Patterns and the Limits of UI Design
September 15, 2025
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...