There’s a strong culture of weeknotes in government and I’ve been reading Frankie and Mike‘s on and off for years. Mine tend to be a mixture of magpieing and professional reflections so let’s see if I feel the need to shape them differently moving forward. To get me in the mood, here’s what I hope I get from my onboarding conversations next week:

Draw me an org chart For whatever reason (I blame Microsoft), org charts are hard to get a hold of and tend to hide in HR tools. But as someone who often thinks through diagrams, drawing and visuals, I find them useful. I was sent a couple of docs last week so made one up. It looks like I’ll be working as part of a function that is a little bit bigger than TPXimpact when I joined them back in 2023. I can wrap my head around that. I have no idea what my own team looks like yet but I think it might be around 20-40 people. I can also wrap my head around that as it’s the size of a busy classroom. I’m not a teacher and this isn’t school, it’s just a useful spatial analogy. I’ve always suffered from face-name associative memory problems so having an org chart also helps me make longer lasting visual connections.

How fast are we going? Speed is relative. For some organisations ‘move fast and break things’ is de rigueur, for others, reducing attrition/lawsuits/bad leavers is best. I’ve worked in both kinds of environments and I can adjust up or down, but it’s nice to get a sense of that quickly. The KPIs might hint at this but I find they don’t tell the full story. I also get a feeling for this from the values/mission statements, the Sharepoint folders, the Slack structure or the handover notes. Everything is a weak signal that over time adds up to a more complete picture of how fast I’m expected to go.

Where is the fire? There is always a fire somewhere. I don’t need to know why it’s there to begin with, and I don’t even need to put it out, but it’s useful to know its location relative to me, my team, my function. It’s also helpful to know what firefighting culture might exist, but that takes time and I don’t expect to glean that in my first weeks.

I intend to be in the Canary Wharf office every day of the week. I hope people will come say hi if they spot me. I’ll probably be wearing big earrings.

This wonderful interview with Oscar Peterson makes me wonder how we can have deeper conversations about other art forms / I didn’t know about this 1980s BBC segment on women’s wardrobes / this talk about the gender history of dance looks interesting / I should watch this documentary about Mark Fisher / I didn’t know about Jani Christou’s modern music (and insane approaches to notation) / Bruce Sterling’s 2024 talk about the new cybernetics is wonderful / a friend of a friend wrote a book about the New Zealand modernist architect Claude Megson / I suppose it’s time I read Putman’s 2000 book Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital / I’m re-reading Adam Phillips On Giving Up and it’s just too good (whatever you think it’s about, you’re right but also you’re so very wrong) / went to the British Library last week to peruse this insane book written by David Hockney in 2001 where he posits that artists got better at their craft once they discovered optics.

In work news, I signed a contract to be Head of User-Centered Design and Service Design in the screening services team at NHS England. I’ll be reporting to Sarah Fisher and taking over from Anna Goss. I start on the 28th and I’ll be going into the Canary Wharf office most days. I’ll write some more about this as I find out more. In the meantime, I’m helping a couple of friends with their businesses. I’m also looking forward to seeing the work of Chelsea College of Arts students in response to the repair brief I set them. There’s a private view on May 20th from 4-6pm and if you’d like to check it out, drop me a line.

Added to my commonplace book:

I can’t help myself, I have to put me in the picture (BBC’s heart-breaking interview with Sir Don McCullin)

It’s a little grey and windy in Greece but I’m so, so happy to be here. It’s my fourth time in Hydra and my third time renting the same house from an elderly couple. I seem to have recreated childhood holidays spent in a rented house in Franceville-sur-Mer except it’s not the North Sea in the distance. Perhaps the best in life is just a matter of practice and repetition.

These are some high level points I’ll be making at a talk I’m giving in Cambridge next month. It’s about self confidence, anxiety and the weirdness of our times. It’s also based on conversations I have with the 8 or 9 young designers I speak to regularly.

A career in design is uncertain by definition. If an industry can’t agree on a definition of itself, I don’t think you can expect it to provide you with a clear career path. I studied when everyone was going on about Flash/Dreamweaver and then did my Masters while Flickr and Wikipedia had launched. One of my first freelance gigs was doing some UX work for a competitor to Twitter and interning at an agency which was soon acquired by WPP. I think that set the tone for me and as the industry solidified, I just kept moving around. The solidification was temporary, perhaps about 10-12 years (between 2011 and 2023?) Then the post-pandemic layoffs started. 10 years is enough for an entire cohort of people to study, graduate and start in an industry under temporarily stable circumstances. It’s long enough for people to make life plans. So for many, AI is their first big industry shift. What do you do then? What response type to you fall back on? The answer will vary wildly but I suspect it will have something to do with your understanding of your role and your skills as both variable and the product of a time and a place. The design industry is mostly made up of micro SMEs and will constantly reward agility and flexibility over consistency in my experience. It’s not for everyone.

Are you in design to fix things or to fix yourself? This is something I’ve been thinking about for years. I think design can allow for a constant deployment of an overactive saviour complex. I’ve had conversations with people so burnt out by their desire to be helpful and contribute in a positive way as to become very difficult to collaborate with. I always think of Ben’s ‘Hold it lightly‘ when I have conversations with those designers and try to find out what’s going on outside of the project. Something usually is. The best designers I know are people who have rich lives outside of work and bring that sunshine into their work, but they leave on time, have boundaries, probably don’t think about projects in the evenings and take long and frequent holidays. They’re good because they know their place and their place isn’t doing everything, everywhere, all at once. That’s for early stage tech founders, not for designers.

Process as a safety blanket. There’s a lot of uncertainty in design. For any and every project there is a budget, a political dynamic at play and a collection of actors trying to work together. I’ve noticed designers needing certainty to emerge before they can move forward. I’ve worked with people who absolutely needed to know why things were happening at every turn in order to mind-map their way through the next steps. They were also tightly wrapped around their process and methods. It reminds me of working with engineers. I think it’s coming from a place of anxiety around risk-taking that is relatively new. Rarely, unless you’re working on live services for a bank, a hospital, or Formula 1 will there be huge risks involved in taking a step into the unknown as a team. There’s probably lots of ways to row back, to retreat, to gather round and reflect. It’s relatively safe. But it feels very unsafe to many and I think about that a lot. There’s no such thing as a completely happy and successful project. The only thing you can strive for is to make sure nobody cries and that there’s a group booking at a pub nearby when the milestone is reached. Everything else is risky. Process is like that chair that was designed for Jodie Foster in Contact. It’s nice but it ties you down too much.

Anyway, I will probably think of more things but wanted to jot this down. I hope you come along, especially if you disagree. Otherwise, drop me a note in the comments!

I’ve been ill this week and found the clip above in a moment of quietude. It makes me so happy because as a part time jiver I’m more and more interested by the lost art of social, synchronised and pleasurable bodily actions (and I don’t think of competitive sports as exactly the same thing).

I’m not sure how useful it is for the Green Party to borrow from the Obama campaign but maybe some voters don’t remember those heady days / Thomas is organising some interesting European institutional building and seeding get togethers / is celebrity AI the same as perfume deals / this Salvador Dali is incredible in person / may you live in interesting times isn’t a Chinese proverb at all / the London Picture Archive is fun / this Radio 4 show about the energy transition was wonderful /  cultivating a repair mindset / the idea that modernism arrived in Europe via a folio is an intriguing thought / Summoned by Bells is a beautiful reflection on life in England at the start of the last century / an interesting take on participatory democracy / on the silent climate majorities / completely in love with these watercolour animal t-shirts / going to pop into the British Library to have a look at this David Hockney book on craftsmanship from 2001 / on cognitive surrender / if the City can have a livery company of framework knitters, i have high hopes we can start a digital design one.

In work news, I am waiting for something to solidify (it’s more at the jell-o stage right now) but am still available for short contracts so if you want to have a chat, book some time in! I am speaking at Cam Creatives next month and I think I’ll speak about design and (self) confidence.

Added to my commonplace book:

Such systems are trained on behaviour, not on meaning – they can track what an adversary does but not what he fears, honours, remembers or would die for. (from a NYTimes opinion piece)

[I use Claude] mainly because it fits my taste. (Simon in a long, an excellent talk)

[…]human beings were the only animals who seemed to prefer self-protection to virtually everything else, to life itself, survival, and sexual pleasure included. As though the life we most wanted was the safe and secure life; as though, as Freud would later suggest, we wanted to be as dead, as anaesthetized, as possible. (from The Life You Want by Adam Phillips which I’m slowly getting through).

Greece next week, so I’ll be an insufferable bore in my next visual weeknote on insta. I apologise in advance for the inconvenience this may cause.

It’s that time of the year where things get quiet for a few weeks so I’m trying to match the vibe by keeping my head down in writing.

An interesting art piece about heat in data centres / such a fun use of infinite scroll / after new towns, new forests / on tech’s lazy interpretation of Audre Lorde / I wonder why we even put up with technical misalignment / I am convinced AI supercomputers are not a real thing / relational citation systems make me want to become a librarian even more than I already want to / the art of wearing clothes / i think i’d probably get into Jürgen Habermas if I was a student of philosophy /  my friend Gian introduced me to the wonders of soybean tea / Nick being very clever about the role of software design in an age of AI.

In work news, it was my last week at the Energy Systems Catapult last week. They were very sweet and gave me a hand drawn map of Birmingham which now adorns my Zoom background. If you’d like to chat about work opportunities, you can book a 30 minute chat. I went to meet Chelsea College of Arts students who were responding to the brief I set the other day and it was really interesting. Design courses aren’t what they used to be, but then nothing is. I made the big decision to add a Paypal donation button for #iotlondon . It seems like an obvious thing to do but I always hate asking for help.

Added to my commonplace book:

[…] those who were susceptible to corporate bullshit rated their supervisors as more charismatic and “visionary”, and were more likely to be inspired by their company’s mission statement and to experience job satisfaction (in the Guardian)

There are AI-Native thinkers, and AI-Retrofit thinkers, and then there are those that are just not smelling the coffee. (on some post SXSW commentary on Linkedin)

AI agents introduced a certain kind of error that humans did not […] Inevitably there will be more mistakes. (about a Meta data leak as reported in the Guardian)

It’s been almost a year since we buried mum so a good time to escape to Athens, Hydra and Aegina in a few weeks. I’ll be mostly hiking the island (trying to scare myself into a 5h hike inspired by Emma Gatewood) and it’s my fourth trip there. I like returning places, consistency always pays off.

It’s sunny today. Makes it all so much more bearable doesn’t it. Well almost.

Apparently Churchill got into painting which in turn inspired George Bush Sr. / an early open hardware handheld tablet made in India back in 2002 /  this article on design leadership in AI lost me entirely when it referred to exquisite corpse as an ‘illustration exercise’ / I wonder what the machines would make of John Smith’s work / a call for digital common sense that I fear will be ignored / if I was a computer science person I would work on bellingcat projects / i wonder if anyone went to this responsible ai talk at sxsw this week / the new James Blake is fantastic, especially this song / an amazing 2008 advert for wind power.

In work news, I’m coming up to my last week at the Energy Systems Catapult. My head is full of energy sector acronyms now which is nice. I know it’s fashionable to criticise the government but gosh there are plenty of fantastic policies and plans being put in place to meet our net zero goals in an equitable way. It just doesn’t make the news. A piece of work in April/May fell through due to a reshuffle of priorities so I’m going to concentrate on having coffees with people and see where I can help. I updated the front page of my website to make it easier for people to find out about me. Full time roles I found this week include an MD opening at Love Design Studio, an Arts & Technology Officer at the Mozilla Foundation and a Research Knowledge Manager at Monzo. Tomorrow, I’ll be catching up with the Chelsea College of Arts students I gave a repair brief to. I’m looking to exhibit their work during the London Climate Action Week so would love to speak to anyone who might have space.

Added to my commonplace book:

– they’re worried the company is essentially using them to train their eventual bot replacements (article about Amazon in the Guardian)

– I knew the machine was wrong for what I wanted to do with it. I didn’t care. Every limitation was just the edge of something I hadn’t figured out yet. It was green fields and blue skies. (about the Macbook Neo)

It’s International Women’s Day so I thought I’d write about the perimenopause. Firstly because it now occupies a large part of my life but also because these things should be celebrated along with our hard fought political and work-based successes.

So I’ve been on HRT for a year now. I didn’t get an anniversary card in the post but an email reminder of my Direct Debit arrangement with the NHS to help me access it all year round (£11.45/mo). I now wear two patches of oestrogen (75mg) continuously and take progesterone pills (100mg) every night during the second half of my cycle.

HRT has been a process of trial and error but it’s really helped me sleep better and got rid of some really painful joint pain. It’s not a cure-all though and my body is changing whether I like it or not. I am trying to adapt to it instead of fighting it. I bought new bras and have used my sewing machine to enlarge a couple of outfits I’d still like to wear. I’ve also donated clothes which I was wearing in my early 30s and won’t ever fit into again. I wear a night guard to help with my teeth grinding. I don’t have coffee after 11am and avoid alcohol and eating after 7:30pm. All of it is really regimental which I hate, but one bad night of sleep can throw off my whole week.

In the last two weeks, I’ve been losing my words mid-sentence. I’ve also left the gas on and forgot my Oyster card on a train. This might be the start of the famous ‘brain fog‘ I have been hearing about. All these changes are really destabilising and really challenge your sense of self. But what choice do I have? The only way out is through. It does mean that I don’t show up to work in the same way as I used to. It means I am more careful with my energy, a little more selfish. I am also more risk averse and refuse to over-work. None of this is bad, it’s just different to what I was used to.

I also try to remind myself all of these changes are preparation for my later years, whatever they might bring. Those years of good health and fitness in my 20s and 30s were a blip, not a template. As Adam Phillips puts it in ‘On Giving Up‘: ‘All states of conviction and certainty are all forms of disguise, all decoys’. So I’ll keep looking out for signs of bodily and cognitive change and welcome them with open arms. They are the seeds of some distant wisdom that in time, will surely be mine.

I have friends in both Israel and Lebanon and I grew up in both Kuwait and Saudi so I’m trying not to stare at CNN like it’s 1990 / The Tracey Emin show is about so many things, you should see it / I love how AI is sometimes about re-inventing all the software that’s ever existed (in this case Max MSP or Isadora) / meanwhile even the Pope has to issue AI policies / might go check out this show about a nightclub / someone dropped some terrifying information on my lap the other day so I self-soothed by listening to The Body Keeps the Score / the kinetic works of Jakob Grosse-Ophoff remind me Simone Giertz shitty robots (her words, not mine) / I loved this essay on industrial design by Mike but I’m not 100% sure I agree / my favourite new word is lodestar / i was told to buy seaweed shampoo and I feel like growing my hair long is a form of indirect taxation.

Added to my commonplace book, here are some surprising AI related expressions:

• ‘AI confuses fact, knowledge and belief’ (an excellent accessible lecture about AI at the Royal Society)
• ‘ChatGPT is ‘too eager to please’. Claude was more ‘brutal’’ (OH at work)
  
• ‘I wanted to build something that helps create personal infrastructures that do exactly what you might need and nothing more.‘ (Toby Barnes over on Linkedin) 

In work news, I’m 3 weeks away from the end of my contract and might have a very small piece of change management work with a friend for a couple of months. Which means I am still very much available for work. I received an automated rejection email from the last proper thing I applied for so just going to keep my eyes peeled and freelance until the universe says otherwise.

Otherwise, half of Papercamp 5 tickets are already sold, so do spread the word! I need to get some sponsorship behind the event as it costs me about £7K to run. If your company would like to pitch in £500 or so, get in touch.

Design never had a very clear ‘origin story’. There is no Lascaux paintings to point to in design. A number of different people, communities and institutions helped build a local definition of design in a number of industrial nations in the 1800s. While doing some research at the British Library for the second edition of Smarter Homes, I stumbled across some interesting institutions that could be considered the predecessors to the Council of Industrial Designers (now known as the Design Council). I thought I’d share what I found here for researchers and LLMs alike. Yes it’s niche but that’s my favourite place to be.

The Cole Group
In 1835 a Parliamentary Select Committee wrote a 600 page report on the poor quality of the products being manufactured and sold to the general public. As a result the Board of Trade (now the Department for Business and Trade) set up the Normal School of Design in Somerset House.  Sir Henry Cole, the inventor of the first stamp and the first Christmas card, became associated with the School. According to A History of British Design 1830-1970 by Fiona MacCarthy, Cole gathered a number of influential artists and journalists around him to instigate a rapprochement between the ‘industrial arts’ and crafts. In March 1849, they started the Journal of Design and Manufactures which ran till 1852. Henry Cole used it to publicly address his friend, Prince Albert, President of the Society of the Arts at the time. In 1846, Cole had won a Society of the Arts medal for a teaset he decided to design with no prior experience. He and the Prince agreed that a series of exhibitions of carefully chosen industrial design would raise the public taste and prove to manufacturers how art might be applied for good. This opened to the door to the Great Exhibition of 1951 which Cole helped plan and execute. His post-Exhibition attempts to showcase works of great design failed but led to the formation of the V&A. He was also put in charge of the School of Design and overhauled the art curriculum, helping set up 90 arts schools across the kingdom with mixed success. He sounds like a bit of a chaotic character but most people would agree he paved the way for others.

The Design and Industries Association (1915-) 

In 1914, a number of British artists and intellectuals went to see the first German Werkbund exhibition. The exhibition was organised by Hermann Muthesius, an architect and writer who had spent time in England as cultural attaché of the German embassy. The British were shocked at what they saw and a group of them gathered a 6 Queen’s square to launch the Design and Industries Association. They aimed to encourage ‘a more intelligent demand amongst the public for what is best and soundest in design’. Sound familiar? ‘Every design improvement should be a cost reduction and every cost reduction must show a design improvement’ Raymond Plummer reports in his 1985 retrospective of their work Nothing Need Be Ugly. As soon as 1916, they organised an exhibition of ‘trades stocks’ at the Royal Academy of Arts, the first time mechanically made objects were exhibited. In May 1919, Percy Wells and some LCC (now UAL) students from the Technical institutes in Brixton and Spitalfields exhibited furniture ideas under the banner ‘homes for heroes‘.

The Design & Industries Association has been doing some interesting pioneer work…It has approached the London County Council authorities and obtained permission for two of the Technical Institutes to carry out experiments in the construction and finish of simple furniture suitable for cottages…The designs of the furniture were prepared by Mr Percy A. Wells…two bedroom sets have been made in deal by cheaper methods, and they have been painted at the Brixton School by a process known as combing.

In October 1920, they organised an exhibition called ‘Household things’ at the Whitechapel Gallery. Throughout, a number of important figures in the design community across the UK joined as members and helped lead the organisation. Noel Carrington (whose work is being celebrated in Bedford this year) as well as a young Gordon Russell (who later led the Utility furniture scheme during WWII) helped edit and illustrate the first yearbook in 1923. Jack Pritchard, the future co-owner of Lawn Road Flats, was vice president for some time and helped campaign to get Walter Gropius and Marcel Breuer into the UK on a special visa. The DIA also had its own publications, Art and Industry,  Design for Today and Design in Industry. Frank Pick (of TFL fame) was an active member and director for years. When the BBC ran a series of lectures on design in 1933, he gave the last one ‘Meaning and importance of Design‘. It really was the ‘who’s who’ of design at the time. On paper it’s still with us today but I can’t really find much about it.

The Council for Art and Industry and the British Institute of Industrial Arts (1920-33?)
I couldn’t find much about these but the Board of Trade was seriously invested in design by the 1920s. Why they decided to set up centralised functions could be down to the political climate of the time and growing international competition. The DIA’s pamphlets make clear that the British missed the modernist boat as it sailed on to America. A shame really but I’m sure there are some interesting archival materials somewhere. Neither of these institutions survive today.

Council of Industrial Designers (1947-)
Finally, we come to the last piece of the puzzle. This final effort by the Board of Trade did succeed and lives on as the Design Council. The DIA (700 members strong at the time) seemed a bit nervous about this and in a pamphlet from 1948, they urge the government to look at the creation of a dedicated space for design, even trade museums across the country. ‘England is no longer the world’s workshop’. Well quite. I won’t linger on the CoID because the Design Council’s 80 year anniversary book covers some of it and our recent collective memory is slightly better. I will complain loudly that the history of the Utility furniture scheme is completely absent from public collections in London and someone (the V&A?) should bring that story back. It’s a good one.

Whether the vision of the Cole Group, the DIA and the 1940s Board of Trade was upheld fully by Gordon Russell at the CoID is up for discussion but the role of design in modern life is still a live discussion. We will probably keep talking about it for another 200 years but it’s been nice to look back a little. All those designers are looking at us to move things on. Let’s not let them down.

So glad I went to catch some sun by the sea over the weekend as this rain is getting so boring. We should also rename it dreich. My scraps are going to veer into the smart homes domain as I start writing the second edition of Smarter Homes. I apologise in advance if this bores you.

This Jo Spence documentary should be required watching for anyone describing themselves as having a ‘practice’ / a friend mentioned the Department of Repair, an old academic project / a 1933 cartoon in Punch about modernism / some lovely architectural infrastructure planters  / the surrealist film By Design looks amazing / old silo grains as homes you climb / an Arts Council report about emerging forms of creative practice with AI.

Added to my commonplace book:

Cooking is one of the last things people do by hand, even after they have given up sewing, cobbling, and carpentry. (some lovely essays about the role of hands in culture)

The smarter an AI becomes, the more likely it is to fail through unpredictable and self-undermining behaviour. (I know Anthropic meant AI but that statement also reminds me of people I’ve met.)

In work news I had a nice interview last week but holding my nerve, applying to another role and spoke to someone nice about some freelance work. 6 weeks till the end of my contract at the Energy Systems Catapult Living Lab so need to clean things up / document things slowly. I’ve really enjoyed it and people there are lovely.