Theory

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...

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...

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,...