The week Ai content generation went mainstream? With GPT-4 launching, and both Microsoft and Google announcing integrations of some form or another, it feels like some kind of threshold was crossed.

Things that happened this week:

• I had grand plans to be really productive at the start of this week (don’t we always) and then got a phone call 9am to tell us the offer we’d made on a house was accepted. Cue every spare moment on Monday and Tuesday being filled with completing estate agent and solicitor paperwork, instead of thinking deep and meaningful thoughts like they would have otherwise been! Good news though, even if it is more change – hopefully we won’t be doing the house thing for a long while after this one.
• With lots of work going on, I increasingly find my role is more of a consultant role i.e. listening, repeating what I’m hearing and making observations, suggestions and offering to support as necessary. I reflected to a colleague today that I’ve not actually edited e.g. research plan, or a prototype or similar for quite a long time (although I did actually help with a service map this week). I’m honestly still trying to figure out how to provide the most value to the teams, people seem happy so I’m still listening a lot.
• One thing I have been actively progressing is some kind of sustainability presentation/workshop/update to technology leadership. Its not solely my work, a group of us have been working ‘side of desk’ over the last year at least on a policy for the application of sustainable design and development approaches within our teams. The topic has come up in leadership sessions and that has filtered back to that unofficial network of ‘champions’ now. Its good evidence for the ‘radiate intent‘ approach to work. I.e. don’t ask, but also don’t do secretly, make it loud and clear what you’re up to, so people can intervene if necessary, but more often than not so people know who to come and talk to when they’re interested to know more.
• Related I’ve been using this approach with the aim of switching up a role for someone in my team. We’ve been discussing a development opportunity, which would be a sideways move into a related role. I’ve spotted a window of opportunity to act on this, so I’ve just started telling people that’s what I intend to do and am waiting to see if anyone genuinely raises any concerns.
• I did do a bit of Ai playing myself. With it integrated into notion, I gave it a whirl to write some blog posts. I wrote up my process, the actual output of the blog posts, and my reflections for you to read.
• I recently made the mistake of referring casually to previous work I was involved in to ‘redesign the fajita experience’ at Las Iguanas…and have now landed myself a community of practice session where I’ll need to pretend it wasn’t just an excuse to get a fully paid up trip for fajitas, but actually a serious design project. It is nice to reflect on how far we’ve come though, that was around 7 years ago, I have fond memories of the work, the team etc but also many many learnings since that I could apply to the project if I was involved in similar again. Nice to feel like I’ve developed and think about all the great thigns the people involved have gone on to do.
• I’ve also reached a major landmark at Co-op. Not two years, although that is coming up soon in April. Instead, the moment where I heard about some work and could say, ‘Oh yeah we were doing pretty much exactly that with X other team before the OD happened’. Feels like this is probably a rite of passage in any big org. One thing working in consultancy taught me was to not be precious about the speed or ownership of delivery of things. I.e. if a throwaway idea you mentioned in a workshop four years ago finally makes it, with someone who was in the room at the time behind it. Celebrate that, it wasn’t *your* idea, it was created through the process you were collectively going through and its success to see it come to life. Likewise here, I’m fully supportive of something similar to what we worked on before, its probably sitting in a more appropriate team now and that increases its chances to making it into the world.

This weeks long read is a proper long one, and continues a bit of the Ai theme too. What drum machines can teach us about articificial intelligence is a deep dive into the history of drum machines and how they’ve been embraced/vilified by Jack Stilgoe, a professor of science and technology policy at University College London.