I’ve been…
- Enjoying a Saturday at UKHealthCamp in Newport. I’m finishing off this weeknote inbetween sessions! As ever, the unconference format proves to be an excellent excellent brain food and an essential power source for my militant optimism battery that we can do stuff better together.
- Not writing weeknotes. I appear to have been on an uninentional two week hiatus. It’s all good, perhaps it was needed! 🙂
- Thinking about how this thing we call digital transformation needs to be sustainable and not break people/teams/organisations in the quest to mirror Sillicon Valley.
- Hugely enjoying reading through user research that colleagues conducted using a prototype of our digital services. This is pragmatism in action. We’re using a ‘customised off the shelf product’. We’ve been struggling a little bit to get our hands on it to ‘show the thing’ to other people to challenge our assumptions. So we knocked up a paper prototype of what we envisage the actual thing will look like. Feedback has been great, as have my budding user research colleagues. The great thing about the proliferation of tech in every day life is that many people can often spot when things aren’t as easy to use or understand as they might be.
- Attending my first ever Service Design Cardiff Meetup. Excellent talks on all things Organisational Change. Some interesting points I picked up on. Making a map of anything with others is at least as useful as having the map itself. People trained in design are not always trained in the art of navigating organisational politics. Our workplaces are often not wired to work with things in a systemic, iterative and continuous manner.
I’ve been reading…
- Designing a service in one week.
https://blog.barnar.do/designing-a-new-service-in-one-week-60824bead28a - HackIT Blog: DevOps Practices: A (primary) cloud on the horizon.
https://blog.barnar.do/designing-a-new-service-in-one-week-60824bead28a - Do we still need managers?
https://sergiocaredda.eu/2019/09/11/do-we-still-need-managers/ - Why can’t I move my data?
https://www.thersa.org/discover/publications-and-articles/rsa-blogs/2019/09/data - Open plan: the revolution that time forgot.
http://workessence.com/the-revolution-that-time-forgot/ - Data sharing in Government: why it’s time for a new approach.
https://medium.com/digitalhks/data-sharing-in-government-why-democracies-must-change-direction-badfaa2463ec - Sainsbury’s reinstalls tills in till-free store.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-49652026 - Metephores we sticker by.
https://medium.com/gov-design/metaphors-we-sticker-by-4e4ecdbf8d64 - Agility: Build the right thing.
https://medium.com/sooner-safer-happier/agility-build-the-right-thing-69d316aeb56b - Uber has troves of data on how people navigate cities. Urban planners have begged, pleased, and gone to court for access. Will they ever get it?
https://medium.com/sooner-safer-happier/agility-build-the-right-thing-69d316aeb56b - To keep people safe we need to have a good argument.
https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/blog/2019/07/good-arguments - Introducing the concept of chatbots into older audiences.
https://unboxed.co/blog/introducing-the-concept-of-chatbots-into-older-audiences/ - Strike 2.0: How gig economy workers are using tech to fight back.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/aug/31/the-new-resistance-how-gig-economy-workers-are-fighting-back