Weeknotes: Sunday 23 February 2025

I finally have a meme — thank you, Andrew!

What I’ve been working on and thinking about:

• Finally got some more hands-on time sketching out our website with the team — somewhere between a low-fi prototype and a wireframe. One tricky bit has been figuring out the ‘Our Work’ section. Right now, it’s hard to clearly see the delivery work we’re doing, so we’ve been looking at ways to make that more visible and easier to navigate. I’ve also been shaping a homepage structure that gives a clearer picture of what we do, how, and why. We shared it with stakeholders this week, and so far, they’ve been really positive. Though the sketches contain placeholder text, I worked on the content before sketching anything — the next step is refining the content with comms manager, Gemma and a translator.

• As part of the service patterns work, I’m reaching out to teams and individuals building digital services without UCD roles to understand their ways of working, the challenges they face, and if or how service patterns could support their work. I’m also working with the team to design a service-mapping workshop for upcoming visits to organisations we support, helping teams gain clearer insights into their own services.
• Had a great catch-up with Gabi — she’d heard we were working on defining our users in a more specific and useful way as an organisation. She’s been doing some work on this too. I see this as an important gap at CDPS that’s been holding back other work. It’s great to see alignment and progress on this as it will strengthen everything we do.
• Speaking of momentum, it’s heartening to see momentum building with some important practices such as weeknotes: my CDPS pals are now writing and publishing regular weeknotes openly — take a look!

Gabi Mitchem-Evans’ weeknotes

Bernie Martin’s weeknotes

Liam Collins’ weeknotes

James Gibbons’ weeknotes

• Finished and sent this month’s newsletter on trust and the systems that scale it. We’ll publish it on our website next month. For now, you can read last month’s: On the quarrel of the old and the new.
• Accessibility is a hot topic at the moment, and that’s never a bad thing. But I’m missing the consideration around accessibility as a trade-off. Nothing is universally accessible to everyone, everywhere, all the time — there are always constraints, whether physical, digital, or situational. Every decision we make includes some people and excludes others — and it’s important to be mindful of who we’re excluding so we can find ways to reduce barriers or offer alternative routes. How do we get better at making these trade-offs consciously rather than assuming accessibility is an all-or-nothing concept?
• Lately, I’ve also been reflecting on the label ‘content design’ and how strange it feels to me sometimes. For quite a few years now, my focus has shifted from content to people: creating alignment, building shared understanding, exploring new ways of working and thinking, and helping others make better decisions and do better work. That’s what I enjoy most, and fortunately, my current role gives me space to do it with some great people. But it’s funny how little I work with content anymore.
• On a slightly similar note, I’ve been on a climbing plateau for a while (6b+), and I have no idea how to get out of it — starting with finding motivation. So if you have any advice on how to push through plateaus in all sorts of life dimensions, I’m all ears!
• A great blog post by Laura Yarrow, Whistepace isn’t empty.
• It’s been an Uncanny couple of weeks since being introduced to the series by Rich Prowse when we went to visit. Even though I don’t believe in this stuff (in my opinion, framing ‘non-believers’ as ‘sceptics’ is misleading) it’s fun to watch. It’d be really frustrating for the ghost if I was ever haunted, as I’d brush it all off with explanations about how flawed our brains and experiences are: hallucinating and making up vivid memories isn’t rare, and I find that fascinating Are we not all living in some sort of shared hallucination?
• Excited about the new season of The White Lotus.
• Speaking of excitement, we booked flights to Japan! We should probably crack on with the planning now, though…

Check my previous weeknotes.