Weeknotes: Sunday 2 February 2025

Adrián Ortega 🗺️🧭
4 min readFeb 2, 2025

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Artwork by Alex Gray projected onto a wall

February already! A couple of weeks of back-to-back meetings without much to show for it — yet. But I think it’s paying off. Everyone seems happy and excited about how things are moving forward.

Here’s what I’ve been working on and thinking about this week:

  • On Monday, my team and I met to work in person for the first time. We’ve met before, but since we’re a remote organisation, we rarely get the chance to hang out as a squad. I really enjoyed it — I’m lucky to have so much fun at work.
  • A new service designer is joining us soon. Though I like the idea of a small, tight-knit team, everyone is excited and I’m sure it’ll be great. I’m thinking about what we could have ready to onboard and set clear expectations from the start — maybe a good opportunity to review my manual of me. The good thing is they’re joining while our projects are already in motion, so they can ease in.
  • Have been working with Liam to design a workshop for Monday with the Senior Leadership Team. I’m hoping to build on previous work and get more specific about our users and their needs. We’ll also map out different user journeys to the website, identify needs, and hopefully define a draft website proposition statement outlining what should and shouldn’t be included.
  • Met with Ben Holliday and Tash Willcocks from TPXImpact on Friday to chat about service patterns and the work we’re doing around it. We wanted to learn more about the service pattern library that FutureGov did with Essex County Council, and our ideas for this workstream to explore if a service pattern library would be valuable for the Welsh public sector. As I told them, I may be biased but my money is still on content patterns, but we’ll see where this takes us.
  • Met Tom Youll and Nia to organise ourselves and the next half year or so of Content Club pep talks. Tom found out about my terrible coffee customs and has decided to make it personal and fix it — starting by sending me fancy coffee beans. I’m concerned this will become an expensive new hobby.
  • Started drafting a blog post called ‘How can service patterns transform Welsh digital services?’ (working title) to complement and share our ideas around service patterns, what we’ve done since the design system for Wales discovery, and what we’re doing next.
  • Have been thinking (for a while) about the value in some organisations of a dedicated design team focusing on enabling and supporting other teams: experimenting, creating alignment and clearing obstacles, turning their direct work into collateral deliverables, and so on. The same way that it’s tough to keep a high-level, strategic view while executing the work, it’s hard to think about all this when you focus on your main delivery goals.
Entrance to Electric dreams at Tate Modern
  • Visited some friends in London last weekend, and attended two exhibitions: Electric dreams: art and technology before the internet at the Tate Modern, and Alex Grey’s Entheon at Illusionaries. The former was more interesting, but the latter was more enjoyable. Electric dreams was so busy that I spent most of my time dodging crowds, and the flickering lights gave me a bit of a headache. That aside, I came across the work of Brion Gysin and Katsuhiro Yamaguchi, who I’d love to learn more about.
  • A video: I watched Tom Loosemore’s talk at DesignConf by Learners, What Everyone Gets Wrong About The Gov.UK Design System. Great to hear the backstory of it. Timely comment for Monday’s workshop: most people start their journey through Google, and only about 7% of people will ever visit your homepage.
  • A book: The patriarchs: how men came to rule by Angela Saini. I’m only a few chapters in, but it’s an interesting look at the history, anthropology and politics of male-dominated societies, challenging the idea (apparently quite extended in academia) that patriarchy is inevitable in the evolution of societies.
  • A random note in my notepad: ‘What’s the real challenge? Get to the core of it to solve actual valuable problems.’
  • Another random note: ‘Design is strategy’.
  • Rowing update: still rowing.

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Adrián Ortega 🗺️🧭
Adrián Ortega 🗺️🧭

Written by Adrián Ortega 🗺️🧭

Existential Holistic Detective 🇪🇸 Content design @ Centre for Digital Public Services 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 linktr.ee/AdrianOrtega

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