I was meant to be watching my son, whilst my wife took my daughter to a party – but turns out he’d rather sit in the car there and back. So you get weeknotes instead.

Lots of research sessions this week, I shared that I was pretty nervous about them but in the end they turned out OK – if that’s not a life lesson I’ve learned through work I don’t know what is…

It seemed that post landed well. I do firmly believe in building things to learn, its a topic I’ve been digging into a bit and is related to my thoughts on justifying a design research approach (which I just realised I incorrectly linked to in previous weeknotes). In short its a bit of a ramble about why learning through doing is a valid approach, beyond running ‘experiments’ with well defined success measures and KPIs.

We watch a lot of The Sewing Bee in this house, as well as doing a lot of sewing (well not me). My wife always has multiple projects on the go, not least because my kids have cottoned on to this opportunity for new costumes or clothes on a regular basis. But often she’ll talk to me about the things she’s learning through the process of making and I’ll mumble something along the lines of ‘Designerly ways of knowing’ or something unhelpful like that. There is a point to this, in life (and sewing) we accept there is only so far a theoretical plan will get us. The pattern is helpful but if you’ve ever watched sewing bee you’ll know its much more about whether the sewers have used those specific techniques before. The most important step is to start doing, and that is when we’ll start learning the most.

Sewing metaphors aside, Jo kindly shared some of my thinking on prototypes in her ‘Service works newsletter’ and I’ve been making good progress on writing it all up. I’ve still got no idea if anyone will consider it doctorate worthy…but I’m learning a lot still.

As part of that I’ve been reading ‘The materials of service design’ (£18 on google play books) which is a pretty good summary of the academic literature around service design and prototyping (or representations as Blomkvist calls them). That said its not a super light fun read, full of case studies and practical application. Its an academic thesis disguised as a book for designers. You have been warned.