Dropping some Saturday morning notes.

Actual project work is tricky to talk about at the moment, for various reasons so I’ll focus on the slightly adjacent stuff.

This week (and some of last week probably):

• I spent some time interviewing for roles at PD, I’ve said a million times before, but nothing else gives me the imposter feels in quite the same way. Continually impressed and always interesting to meet new people.
• I spent some time with a team ‘handing over’ some service design work I’d done within a live service, so that they can prototype it for a future iteration of the digital service. It’s massively edge-casey and i can tell that different roles feel different levels of comfort with that. I.e. there will always be exceptions to your process map, sorry I don’t know what else to tell you, people are involved.
• We had an internal Design community of practice ‘lean coffee’ session. Ai came up (possibly inevitably). We talked about the joy of automated transaction Vs old school manual, as well as the risks of Ai synthesis/analysis of the data. I also rambled on a bit about the possible value of Ai prototyping tools, reflecting that in my experience the lack of a shiny prototype hasn’t been the problem in most work I’ve been involved in. Creating the thing is maybe 5% of the work, at most. Landing the service/business change is the hardest bit.
• Sorta related. I tried to watch the Sam & Jony video in the coffee shop. I couldn’t make it to the end sorry. I know that people love to hear the fact that design is being prioritised by tech, because it so often isn’t. But some of the statements are unbearably hyperbolic. Imagine suggesting that an engineering startup is “The densest collection of talent…that probably has ever existed in the world”. Ever existed, in the world. This is why I’d never survive working in the US.
• In still slightly cynical, but more tongue in cheek news. I dropped a bunch of stickers and stuff into the office for people. Turns out a few people enjoyed the idea of Jira snark. If you do too, help me cover the costs of getting them printed…check them out on Etsy.

Outside of work:

• Sunny weather has meant a bit of time out on the bike. Reminded how lucky I am to be in Cardiff with access to roads/trails so easily
• Built a bench for the garden. ‘Supported’ by my children asking me why I was doing anything every 5 seconds
• Cleared out the loft at my Mother in Law’s. Found the start of a computing museum up there (amongst plenty of rubbish). Friday night was spent sorting through for selling on eBay. It’ll add to the retirement fund nicely hopefully.