Weeknotes: Sunday 30 March 2025

Edinburgh castle

Eventful few weeks — still doesn’t feel like business as usual, especially with a packed Services Week where I couldn’t attend everything I’d have liked. Maybe this is the new business as usual, and I just need to adapt.

Here are some things I’ve been working on and thinking about:

• Our two main projects at the moment: improving our website and exploring service patterns. The new website design (not the whole thing, unfortunately) is currently being tested. After our day working on service patterns with Mid and West Wales Fire Service in Carmarthen, we’re heading to Ebbw Vale next week to work with Blaenau Gwent Council — exciting! Service designers Loubna and Alex are coming with us, and I’m really looking forward to Wednesday. Unfortunately, it means I won’t be able to attend Cymru Newydd’s launch event at the Senedd as I’d planned.
• On Monday, I officially stepped into the senior designer position, supporting my service design and interaction design colleagues as a line manager. I’ve been putting things in place and starting conversations with them. It’s been great catching up with everyone individually and seeing where they’re at. They’re all very different people, in different situations, with different challenges — and I hope I can support them in ways that actually help. It’s strange stepping into this role when I’ve known most of them for a while. But it’s also nice that getting closer to them is now part of my job. Hopefully, as I make sense of everything, things will start to shift from mess to order.
• Had some tough conversations about what this role means and what Nia’s advice — ‘be the manager you’d like to have’ — actually means to me and looks like in practice. Putting one’s ego aside and just doing the right thing for others isn’t always easy.
• Travelled to Edinburgh with Liam and Sam (our delivery manager). Had a great time with them, and it was brilliant to meet the ScotGov team working on service patterns. We compared contexts (and they don’t seem that different, really), shared our approaches to working with partner organisations, and started to define a framework and shared language to talk about service patterns. We also explored collaboration opportunities, including a monthly catch-up (it may be worth us considering an open drop-in to connect with people working on service patterns across the wider UK public sector). There were discussions about joint presentations and workshops, and we’re submitting a workshop proposal to SDinGov called “Designing across nations: mapping services with repeatable patterns”. Exciting stuff, and it feels like we’re in a virtuous cycle where the more we put in, the more we get out. Also, really excited to set an example of design collaboration across devolved nations.
• In a few months, we’ll be picking up the service manual work again, and I’m starting to consider how we can build upon all the work done around service patterns to shape it.
• I asked the ScotGov’s team about mygov.scot which they mentioned in their Services Week talk, and I was surprised I’d never come across it before (though of course, I don’t live in Scotland). I’m interested in exploring something similar for Wales — some sort of public services front-end wrapper to provide people with tested, user-centred, and consistent access to existing services while we work on the back-end, which will inevitably take longer as it’d depend on so many more variables outside of our control. I’ve already taken this idea to some colleagues and would like to take it to the senior leadership team and see what they think.
• It was brilliant to spend some in-person time with Sam and Liam, especially Sam, since we rarely get the chance — sad that Promise couldn’t be there with us though! Remote work is great, but it makes unstructured time together feel like a luxury even though it’s so important to get to know people personally.
• Attended Content Club’s Pep Talk with Imra Hussain (GOV.UK Design System’s community designer) and Calvin Lau (senior content designer) on Bringing everyone into content design. Great ideas on how they do this, but I’m always more interested in people’s squiggly paths into their roles. We’ll share the recording on YouTube soon.
• Wrote (but yet to send) the latest newsletter, provisionally titled On spring, imagination, and the futures we make. Just need to find some time to set it all up and send it. Hopefully soon!
• People want guides and rules to follow until they realise they don’t quite fit their context. Then they get frustrated. How do we design guidance that acknowledges this reality?
• There’s a persistent confusion between digital and tech, probably because tech is the visible, tangible (sometimes shiny) thing. Related note: it’s easy to fall in love with or be too afraid of the tool itself.
• If you’re going through a rough patch, Last One Laughing Ireland is the silliest, funniest thing I’ve seen in ages. Had me in stitches all week.

Check my previous weeknotes.