I’ve been reminding myself of what Jane Jacobs wrote:

“[…] there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.”

Everything we do in design is with others, otherwise we would run the risk of calling ourselves artists. The difference between work I’ve done elsewhere and in the team I’m now in (Digital Screening) is that we’re doing this in service of people running live services (Screening). Our missions are intricately linked.

I tried to illustrate the environment teams work in below. A digital designer will be in a UCD team working with colleagues in product, tech and delivery on a project. That project is probably part of a programme managed by a programme manager (they’re called Pathway Leads) that work closely with SLT. Deputy Directors sponsor a number of programmes but Heads of (that’s me and my colleagues) help all the projects across all programmes. Sometimes the projects are small, sometimes they’re very tech focused and there is little UCD, sometimes they’re brand new and it’s all user research.

Programmes interact with national screening programmes as we’re probably trying to modernise some of the digital services that are already in place.

SLT might give feedback, helping reframe something, place the right people in work at the right time, manage any problems that arise. It’s a team sport. I can’t win on my own. I need my bosses to have visibility of what I’m thinking about, I need other Heads of to give me feedback or support me, and I need individuals in my practice to know what’s going on.

Equally, design work that is done in the dark doesn’t last. It needs the rough and tumble of other people’s opinions to earn its polish. Designers get feedback from subject matter experts, clinical assurance folks, policy teams and more. There is no space to work in isolation, there is just compromise. This can be heartbreaking for designers just wanting to ‘make things on the internet’ but in a space where AI is now telling people lies about their health, we need as many eyes as we can to develop the solutions that will get people to trust the information they receive, book an appointment and get tested. If you want to go further go together right? Here, more than most places I’ve worked in, design is the expression of that togetherness.

500 opened tabs on my phone are burning a hole in my pocket so here we go.

I was delighted to hear Gener8tion (yes from that amazing video) studied art in Villa Arson which I visited last Christmas / Steven Ahlgren’s photographs of offices in the 90s are iconic / a lovely and deeply depressing visualisation of Guardian Blind Dates / I’m not into horror films but I would start a romcom equivalent of the Nickel Cinema in a heartbeat / my work commute is making me think of buying a train departure display / a very funny take on how to behave like an AI snake oil salesman / French nannies probably need open source platforms / a map to show you where you can see the National Emergency Briefing film / the word garner used to describe a form of leased storage / having flashbacks to 2006 with thought pieces about how easy it is to program now / I didn’t know the founders of Matières Fécales met in Montréal at College Lasalle / a fun interview with Paulina Borsook and friends is a good reminder the web was created by hippies /  an incredible doco about the bloody history of the sugar trade / this short political film gets right to the point and I wish liberal governments would deploy the arts in more strategic ways / humorphism feels like service design on crack / a friend interviewed Marina Abramović when she turned 50 / still thinking about this Greek semolina cake /  a new magazine about food and conviviality / the mountain range that looks like a woman sleeping / a great read on design and organisational politics /  this two day anti-conference by Made by Many looks cute / Peckham Digital have an open call for submissions.

Some health related links (because of new job):

How PE classes impact your appetite for physical activity later in life / Richard wrote a nice piece about complexity / Tero was interviewed about design in the NHS / a heartbreaking piece about preventative medicine hesitancy by parents and how it compromises infants.

Added to my commonplace book:

Likes are cool, replies are better, conversations are best (found on Bluesky).

What you need won’t appear until you need it. […] Sometimes you just have to decide. At other times you won’t even need to do that. (from The Imperfectionist)

Images taken in the Cupola bear some thematic resemblance to representations of women in visual art in the late 19th century (from a journal article about population distribution inside the ISS)

In social news, I had a very busy week last week with something on almost every night. I gave a talk at CamCreatives in Cambridge, went to Interesting (which was lovely), ran the 154th edition of the London Internet of Things Meetup and had a friend over for dinner. I haven’t been that busy since the early 2000s. Next week, thankfully, is quieter.

I’ve figured out that my weeks are like sandwiches. Mondays and Fridays are quiet, while Tuesdays to Thursdays are back to back meetings. With a sample of 3 weeks, is it really a work pattern or a short term trend? That question lingered as I was drawn into a couple of conversations about service patterns. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of any desire to organise and categorise just like I’m suspicious of ‘one size fits all’ t-shirts. More often than not, bespoke experiences (or fitted garments) take more time but lead to longer lasting products.

It would be easy to take the 6 screening programmes (breast, lung, bowel, cervical, prostate cancer screening as well as diabetic eye screening) and say they all take similar approaches. They’re all about selecting people, notifying them they’re due for a test, sending them results. Sure. That sounds reasonable. But you take one step closer to the problem and you quickly encounter local constraints: the age of that screening service and associated tech stack, where a test is conducted (on the phone, in a mobile clinic, in a hospital, somewhere else) how those test sites operate and their related tech stack and finally whatever data you have and haven’t shared yet. With so many different conditions, what would a pattern do? How might it help? Or do we mostly need teams to share their lessons and approaches in a way that isn’t too superficial and leads to pairing up and mentorship across projects? I will stay with the trouble and try to find out.

Lastly, as I keep reading weeknotes and sit in check-ins, the overarching pattern that emerges is that UCD is a thin wedge between staff and the general public. Without design, things would largely continue to happen, people would just spend more time with bits of paper and on the phone. So if we’re going to show up and disrupt their ways of working, we better make a great impression.

Second week was a short week again. I thought about Ed Ruscha a lot. I sat in some more team check-ins and by virtue of repetition, words start to float up to the surface. I’m spotting patterns but it doesn’t mean they’re service patterns, they’re just activities each team has to develop in a way that reflects their material, informational and computational realities. If we can see like a state, we can also see like a technology administrator. Maybe some things are better thought of as binomial nomenclature, or variants of a species rather than waste and replication.

I eavesdropped on a session by the King’s Fund on admin. It left me thinking about the modern definition of admin more than whatever the NHS might be doing. Health prevention might, on a good day, be thought of as life extending admin. And maybe we should lean into that admin-ness some more.

Office life is nice and I’m slowly meeting new people over lunch but also have a bunch of dedicated e-coffees lined up. I’m also going to get a building induction which means I get to go to the loo and leave the building unaccompanied. Bodily freedom at last! Looking forward to understanding the UCD team’s rituals and side quests as well as what has happened in the recent and not so recent past. A design history for a design team if you will.

I spent a lot of time on dance floors when I was in my 20s and I have been jiving on and off since 2014. Sometimes you go to a night out in a venue you’ve never been to and you’re trying to find your friends either on or off the dance floor. Eventually you get yourself a drink at the bar, find a table to put your bag on, and stand there waiting for the next song to come along so you can join the fun.

I spent most of the week in very information dense check-ins with a few teams. Digital Screening Services has 13 teams working as part of 7 programmes of work. They are all differently shaped, have different goals and are at different moments in their disco to maintenance journey. I didn’t say much, took a lot of notes, wrote down a lot of new acronyms.

Every team has the same high level questions to answer but the way they answer them is unique to their circumstances. Those high level questions feel like they might be:

• Who should we select for preventative screening?
• How might we invite them successfully enough that they attend an appointment?
• How do we communicate results or next steps effectively?

But it’s early days. I might change my mind about that.

I enjoyed sharing some early impressions with my immediate peers James and Dan and my bosses Sarah and Lauren made time to welcome me in between meetings. I gave Giles a hug as I bumped into him near the lifts, I virtually waved at former TPXimpact colleagues who are dotted around the place, had lunch with Frankie, spotted some folks I’ve never spoken to IRL but definitely follow on the internet and had a too quick catchup with Joe who I will be spending a lot of time with.

That’s what this week felt like. I haven’t got a table yet, but I’m ordering a drink.

Back in the UK on Monday so these might still be orange blossom scented as I’m still in Greece.

It’s been almost 20 years since I saw Martin Butler‘s The Girlfriend Experience and I wonder how you might recreate it today / going to have to buy this book on the history of home economics / the story of the dala horse and how it developed is fascinating / I watched a Figma Make tutorial and it’s as if you’d asked me to learn Autocad through keyboard shortcuts alone without touching the mouse / blog posts about the illusion of software as driving the world or digital experiences as headless still leave me thinking that none of this is explainable to your grandmother / having lived in Kuwait in the 80s and 90s, their recent immigration clampdown comes as no surprise at all / I need to put a health hat on from Tuesday when I start my new job so probably going to add The Citadel (1937) to my reading list / 58% of business coaching clients and 72% of coaches are women so I’m starting to think of it as another pink tax / finally it would be great if AI ‘brain fry’ helped men understand women’s well documented invisible labour and cognitive load but I fear I might be pushing things a little too far.

In work news, I prepped for next week’s 153rd London Internet of Things Meetup , ran a couple of interviews for a friend who is looking at the future of her business, chaired a Mediale board meeting and was interviewed for a voluntary role.

Otherwise, I was mostly swimming, hiking and eating Greek village bread.

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.