Sneaking a September weeknote in.

Its been a while and this past month has been pretty busy. My wife has worked more in the last month than for probably the last couple of years, strangely enough because they’re shutting the charity she’s been running down. She can now add ‘pulling up all the floor tiles’ to the long list of other jobs she’s done over the years.

Conferencing

I also spent a bit of time up in Edinburgh for SDinGOV. It was my first time going – because I’ve never really been doing service design in government/government adjacent orgs before. It was lovely to meet up with old and new faces as well as hear talks and attend workshops. I won’t attempt to do them all justice, but suffice to say there were some really reflecting and energising sessions, as well as ones that made me wonder if we were still having the same conversations as 10 years ago.

Over a really lovely dinner with colleagues I said something like:

“I get loads more value from the sessions that say something like ‘Gee its complicated, but this is how I’ve been trying to do good work’ rather than ‘I consider myself the expert, please listen to my opinions’…”

And that’s a really tricky line to tread, but some did it better than others. I can’t remember the last conference I went to before SDinGov this year, but the sessions very much tended towards thoughtful and nuanced compared to some I’ve been to before. Increasingly I find myself getting value from ‘warts and all’ conversations with fellow practitioners, rather than ‘glossy’ presentations.

My other reflection was how it feels to go to a conference whilst working for somewhere with the same kind of connections as PD – people don’t necessarily know who I am (thankfully) but know PD, and I was able to bump into people and introduce myself because of the PD network (Hi Katy, Dean and Ian) as well people who are joining PD too (Hi Nic). I don’t consider myself a great networker, but it slightly lowered the hurdles at least.

Service design in the weeds

Work-work has been dialling itself up over the past few weeks. I reflected on the shift of what I think service design can bring to the work two weeks ago and it very much stands true.

Chatting to a colleague I said something along the lines of “there’s a risk that whilst we’re trying to map everything out perfectly, we’re missing the conversations where the things that actually make the experience get decided”. Well it was nothing like that in reality, but that’s kinda what I meant. There’s no point tweaking the blueprint to perfection, whilst the letters are being written by the data governance lawyer without you knowing. The letters are going to be the service not the blueprint.

The person using the service will never know how your blueprint looked. They will read the letters, hear the phone calls, use the web form.

Maybe ‘service design in the weeds’ is my ideal conference name?

Making things

Trying to keep myself stretched on all fronts (possibly too much) I’m still experimenting with different ways to communicate my research work. Aka I’m finding excuses to open Figma and print stickers.

People seem to be enjoying the stickers, perfect for you laptop, or your notebook for that matter.