Weeknotes: Sunday 20 April 2025
4 min readApr 20, 2025
It was a short and fairly quiet week — I worked a few days remotely from Spain. It was good to have a change of scenery and spend some time with family.
Here’s what I’ve been working on and thinking about these past few weeks:
- As I mentioned in my last weeknotes, Liam roped me into a talk at UX Wales on our work around service patterns. I really enjoyed it and it worked really well as a conversation — lots of thoughtful questions and reflections! I was right to assume not many people would work in the public sector, though they all seemed really interested and engaged. I talked about how public design may not be glamorous and we don’t deliver shiny things, but the complex environment that we operate in makes it interesting. It’s design in a space full of variables, constraints and dependencies. I also talked about blueprints and maps as useful oversimplifications: the map is not the territory, and all that.
- Liam and I reviewed the research findings from our website work and used the feedback to iterate the prototype. Lots of positives (we’ve broadly met the short-term goals we set) and some areas to work on longer-term. Those are more strategic and organisational, but the result of our work feels good. We’re starting to switch gears and look ahead to the service manual again.
- Speaking of the service manual, our squad had a session with senior leaders this week to walk through the roadmap for the year. It sets out our delivery commitments by quarter (spoiler alert: service manual and service patterns), but leaves us space to shape the work which I think is important and exciting. I believe we do better work when squads lead the design of the work.
- Service designer Alex is still fairly new with us, which got me thinking about all the unwritten ways of working we have. So I brought the old GDS “It’s okay to…” poster to the service design meeting for us to review as a team (Giles Turnbull wrote It’s okay to say what’s okay about it). It was an opportunity to discuss this tacit knowledge, what doesn’t apply to us, and what other rules we have in CDPS considering our remote context. We talked, for example, about how it’s okay to turn your notifications off and block focus time in your calendar or work away from your laptop, or reject meetings without a clear agenda or description. A small thing but a good opportunity to start a discussion about these things with the team.
- I’m really pleased about Liam’s promotion to Senior Interaction Designer. Looking forward to (continue) working closely with him (alongside Gabi and the other seniors) to shake some things up.
- Random reminder to self: we’re (but) a node in a network. The impact of our work comes from others picking it up, using it, and shaping it. It’s not top-down. It’s shared, and it spreads sideways.
- I’ve been thinking about the diffusion of innovations. According to that, innovators (2.5%) and early adopters (13.5%) lead the way before reaching a tipping point where change becomes widely spread and self-sustained. Does this apply to organisational change? How do we cross the chasm with cultural shifts?
- Easter means Semana Santa back home. Nia came for the first time during the ‘Holy Week’, so we went to see some of the processions. I hadn’t done that in decades — they always felt like a nuisance when I lived there. Something to escape and that made me avoid the main streets. It may be age or distance, or both, but I found them quite engaging and enjoyable this time: solemn, impressive, and oddly reflective.
- Every so often I come back to David Foster Wallace’s ‘This is Water’, and it always gives me different things to ponder at different stages of my life. This time, it made me reflect on the importance of consciously choosing what to think and what to think about: being mindful of where to place your attention, and how.
- I’ve got one of those ‘One Line a Day’ journals. It’s more like ‘One Line Every Few Months’ to be honest. I opened it today and found a note from 6 October 2020: “Design is a conversation, but not everyone is open to having it.”
You can check my previous weeknotes, and reach out to me via LinkedIn or Bluesky if you fancy a chat.
