So April disappeared hey.
For me it disappeared whilst going back and fore to the hospital to look after my daughter. Thankfully she was never very unwell, we live very close to a very large, modern children’s hospital and we had great support from family and friends. But nonetheless, it has been exhausting. Everything else has taken a back seat including most of work.
Thank you to everyone who happily rescheduled things whilst being sympathetic and understanding, thank you to all of you who might work on the front line of healthcare, and respect to all of you who have long term caring commitments that require all of your spare energy and time.
Because of that, no extensive weeknotes on what I’ve been up to. One of the things I did to entertain myself during long days of being sat on a hospital ward was browse and read articles. So here is a collection of the best ones I found & read with a few notes.
Design MBA
Have been keeping an eye on the dMBA people for a while – saw they published this openly…and thought it was a nice intro to modelling out business cases to inform design.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lX5B-kha1lQ
They’ve got other ‘guides’ here you can take a look at, as well as a free email ‘Mini MBA‘.
Lisa Koeman
I love some good visualisation work, and Lisa’s is some of the best I’ve seen for a while around user journeys and user interviews. Throw in some neat animation and sounds too, what a combo!
Three things that stood out to me from her work:
‘Seeing Interview Structures‘
‘A more qualitative look at analytics data’
‘Representing Non-linear journeys‘
That last one is excellent, and has got me wondering about how we could apply it to service design.
PDR CO:RE Cards
Managed to see a preview of these whilst visiting old colleagues at PDR. I think these could be nice workshop conversation starters.
“CO:RE Cards: a COllaborative and REflective deck designed to encourage dialogues, mutual learning and collaboration among creative practitioners based in Wales. The deck is developed to nurture an improved understanding of the ‘language’ surrounding R&D and innovation, as well as reflect our effort as part of Media Cymru to facilitate potential collaboration in the creative industries.” – https://www.pdr-consultancy.com/news/collaborative-dialogues-with-core-cards
There’s a link with some images in there, but I’m hoping to maybe see a fuller download or even a purchasable card deck.
Marzia Aricò
This is gold…Organisational Fundamentals for designers. It starts with the usual narrative of why its important for Designers to understand their org business model and context etc. But probably the best bit is the ‘cheat sheets’ Marzia has created for each common department in a large org – what they care about and the kind of KPIs they use. All with the intention of using these to frame how designers relate to those other departments.
Five Design Research roles enabling Agile Collaboration
An ongoing aim of mine is to communicate and demonstrate the value of design research ways of working. I think this is a nice way to start communicating the transferable skills that designer researchers bring to digital transformation/Agile type projects.
https://www.stby.eu/2023/12/07/five-design-research-roles-enabling-agile-collaboration/
alistairuff 
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