An online notebook
Ten reflections on design leadership⬈ by Martin Wright as he departs TPX Impact. #
Gavin Beckett is moving on from Placecube to Public Digital, which is nice for him, but for us means he has written a thought provoking set of reflections⬈. #
Your user needs are crap! (And so were mine.) Ten ways to improve user needs…⬈ – via Roger⬈. #
Am playing around a bit with Feedland, Dave Winer’s newish RSS aggregating thing. I like how it is all public, so anyone can see the feeds I subscribe to and what is in them. Am enjoying the desktop app feel of NetNewsWire for now, so don’t think I will be switching, but it’s fun to play 🙂
Laura Bunt is great and this interview gives an insight into how!
“What next for digital government and Government as a Platform?” Very interesting:
The next step for government as a platform is to directly help services transform. We’ll do this in two ways: first by going much further to help people make better design decisions for their services, and second, by helping services continually optimise themselves.
“The Transforming Government Services team in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) is redesigning the products and services offered to other government departments to support the delivery of their services. This includes updating existing standards and guidance, so that more services are implemented to a ‘great’ standard.”
Lovely bit of LocalGov blogging: Nature’s Genius: Service Innovation through Biomimicry.
This is a great story, about the wonder that was Yahoo Pipes, beautifully told… and now I am really interested in Retool, so I guess it did its job (tech marketers, take note)!
Working as a community to iterate the task list pattern:
We kicked off with an open call to join an online workshop, and had over 120 participants attend from dozens of government organisations. This helped us to understand the diversity of ways in which the task list pattern was being used, from application forms to case management systems, as well as collecting research findings, and user needs that the pattern was helping with.
From the workshops a smaller group, comprising designers and researchers from across different government departments, was formed to work on iterating the actual design.
Collaborating in this way wasn’t always fast – the work had to be fitted in around everyone’s main roles – but a dedicated Slack channel and semi-regular calls helped to maintain momentum.
Also this:
Not been looking forward to today really. I have to go to see a foot specialist about an ulcerated wound on the balls of my right foot. It’ll be good to start getting it sorted, but it involves going somewhere I have never been before, not sure about parking etc, and the whole thing fills me a bit with worry.
I had no idea that Sarah Lay was back working in local gov, but am delighted she is.
A reflective, open and personal post from Carl. People – including ourselves – are not perfect, and that’s just the way it should be.
The challenge now for design in policy – I like a lot of the stuff in this post, which includes lessons that work for many relatively new disciplines, not just design.
Systems analysis at the ‘front end’ of service design can help us to better understand complex social problems and identify opportunities to respond more effectively and profoundly. Equally, systems thinking provides tools and mindsets to understand the power structures and ‘system immune responses’ which so often kill new solutions before they get off the ground.
Original: https://medium.com/@adam.d.groves/from-service-design-to-systems-change-72fa62b1714c