Service Design

A small exchange in the team chat this week crystallised something I've been pondering for a while now.

The previous post argued that service patterns - the repeatable structures of work that users perform across multiple products - need to be understood before the components that implement them can be...

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...

The previous post identified four orientations that public sector programmes tend toward - risk, efficiency, provider, and demand - and showed how each orientation shapes which failures become...

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...

The design systems framework I have been developing includes events as one of eight core elements, defined following Gärdenfors (2017) as atomic cause-effect triggers with a force vector and a result...

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...

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?

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...

During ethnographic observation on the ward, something small kept catching my attention: the doctors' notebooks. Not the electronic patient record, not the digital dashboard on the screen at the...

This week's focus was on synthesis: taking the observations, interviews, and documentary analysis from recent weeks and developing representations that could communicate the complexity of ward-based...

This week marked a shift in focus. After several weeks working on data access services - exploring state charts, object-oriented UX, and the underlying data models of administrative systems - I've...

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...

This week has been focussed on modelling the data flows and service logic for the registration process that sits between two NHS services: the Data Access Request Service (DARS) and the Secure Data...

This week I began work on what is called the 'registration' part of the NHS Secure Data Environment service. The first thing I inherited was a business process model, produced by a colleague, mapping...

This week a lot of my work has, from a variety of different directions, coalesced around an analysis of the navigation patterns on the old NHS Digital website, where the Secure Data Environment...

This week has involved some user research, exploring the Expression of Interest Form and user onboarding flow for the NHS Secure Data Environment service that I am currently working on.

This week began on Monday with my 1:1 and following that some time completing a little more mandatory training.

This week, whilst continuing to wait for a computer and access to the organisations internal/HR systems, I did some wider reading around NHS patient data flows and the stakeholders, and about the...

This is the first of what I hope will be a regular approach to weeknoting my new role as a Service Designer at NHS England. Weeknoting is something I have followed from afar and wished that I had had...

I was reflecting after the Experio Seminar last Friday, something that I have been thinking and writing about for a few years is perhaps worth formalising. Two distinct research traditions have...

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,...

This post synthesises the literature on what happens when Design enters organisations governed through the programme management tradition - the stage-gate reviews, programme boards, benefits...

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...

The preceding posts in this series have established a set of arguments: that many public sector programme management cultures are optimised for accountability and risk reduction, not hostile to...

The previous post argued that governance structures in public sector programmes are better understood as design material than as obstacles to be navigated. But there is a prior question that argument...

This is the fifth post in The Contested Prototype series. The first post described the practical situation; the second developed a prototyping typology grounded in Floyd (1984) and the Scandinavian...

This series has been circling around the concept of governance for some time without confronting it directly. The first post described the epistemological tension between design and programme...

The previous post argued that service design offers programme management cultures three things they cannot generate from their own logic: the cross-cutting view, the surfacing of invisible decisions,...

The previous post established the epistemological tension between design and programme management: both orientations are legitimate responses to real constraints, but the culture that results from...

The first post in this series described how strategic abstraction becomes delivery avoidance. The second examined the practical and epistemological problems of starting - how designers defer entry...

Programme management in the public sector - and in the NHS in particular - is structured around accountability, milestone delivery, and risk reduction. These are not arbitrary cultural preferences;...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The previous post concluded that the Motivational Design Framework lacked a unifying architecture - that the synthesis of SDT, discrepancy theory, ARCS, flow, and Dreyfus was ad hoc rather than...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

The previous post introduced statecharts - David Harel's visual formalism for reactive systems, providing a rigorous notation for states, transitions, hierarchy, and concurrency. Statecharts...

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...

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...

This post draws on a paper Ana Kustrak and I presented at the NORDES 2023 conference, exploring the metaphors through which the role of "service designer" is understood in Swedish public sector...

I have submitted a paper to the NORDES 2023 Doctoral Consortium exploring something that has been building throughout this series: the psychodynamic processes that emerge when designers attempt to...

The two preceding posts in this series have established a framework for thinking about aesthetics in service design: Folkmann's (2013) three platforms - sensual-phenomenal, conceptual-hermeneutical,...

The previous post argued that service design faces an aesthetic deficit: a lack of vocabulary and theoretical apparatus for discussing how services structure experience across sensual, conceptual,...

Before I became a service designer, I spent several years working as a ski instructor in Norway. The transition from teaching people to ski to designing public services might appear to be a...

In previous posts, I've described what federated learning is and what it would actually require. This post is about what happened when I tried to understand the algorithm that the project was...

Three months into this industrial doctorate, I find myself in an unusual position. I was hired as a designer - someone with a background in service design, interaction design, and design research -...

In my recent post on concept modelling of work rehabilitation, I presented a series of hierarchical and graph-based visualisations synthesising different theoretical models from the vocational...

I've spent the past week reviewing the literature on vocational rehabilitation models - ICF frameworks, biopsychosocial approaches, Swedish return-to-work research. Yesterday I documented that...