My interest in other ways to write about history continues. One notable book that I read this month lends its title to this newsletter. Brian Klass’s Fluke talks to how so many solutions are based on just random things happening, and how therefore we need to be careful about over-determinism when measuring success as we live in complex adaptive systems were one little change can have huge con (which is also spoken about in Marianne Bellotti's Kill It With Fire). I also like how it shows how events are shaped by people and their histories, with some events having repercussions years if not decades later (the most remarkable one being US general Henry Stimson visiting Kyoto with his wife in the 1920s and later stopped the city being a target for nuclear bombs in World War II).

A couple of other books I have read this month have played to this theme.Upstream by Dan Heath looks at how we can better consider prevention rather than cure (with one key example being regular forecasting activities — something that made me think of Jane McGonigal’s Imaginable). It does also talk about the challenge of scale in that the bigger any experiment is, the harder it is to replicate. And I am part-way through HCI Remixed. It’s a collection of essays about what inspired people to get into HCI (the fact that the book is also from 2008 also makes it from a different time). It's also a start reminder of flukes for getting into tech (one stumbling on it via music) but also that things that seem inevitable now often did not seem so at the time. For example, I was familiar with Doug Englebart's famed 1968 "The Mother of All Demos" (which showed using a keyboard, mouse and recognisable GUI), but not that even with that demo that Englebart struggled to get funding—it’s a reminder (also discussed later in the book) that the diffusion of innovation requires multiple passes and just a bit of luck.

(A few more) books

• I’ve finished The Student by Michael S Roth. Roth is the president of Wesleyan University, and while his book focuses on US universities in the modern age, he goes right back to Confucian and Greek teaching. The book is admirable in talking about privilege and access (is a university about freedom, being a good citizen, or getting a good job?), particularly the challenges of WED Du Bois getting to university in the US (to have a moment of race-free bliss in Germany before having to return)
• I also finished the book Experts in Government — it’s a brisk read at only 60 pages, but similar to The Student spans the early Chinese and Roman era to current day (admittedly more to the US). It notes the fundamental tension between expertise in policy and loyalty to the executive of the day, with a memorable comment from one past president that actually government staff should merely be competent as the ‘best and brightest’ should be in the private sector making money rather than doling it out(!)
• AI and Other Stories by Anna and Penny Pendergast is a collection of essays about AI. I picked up some good terms from the series such as a reminder for maintenance and care as well as trust and relationships, ‘frontier-thinking’ (often used in tech) and its related ‘digital colonialism’ (offshoring of cheap tasks) which then is countered with ‘decolonising data’.

Links

I did a lot of clearing down of links this month, hence the chunky list.

• I wrote a thing back at the start of the month about design and uncertainty
• As of 19 February the GOV.UK crown as designed for Her Late Majesty Queen Elizabeth II is no longer in use on GOV.UK. Instead we now have the Tudor Crown. GDS have written about the change and there is a more general press release on GOV.UK.
• More from GDS folk: on the back of them doing work on AI, Kuba Bartwicki talks about why product AI teams need designers.
• I like the work that is happening over at the DWP on value mapping
• I have a lot of threads relating to either open history or the need for it: from Anton Howes saying that history has a reproducibility crisis to Toby Burrow talking about reproducibility, verifiability, and computational historical research to Spencer Wright talking about documentation and Little Futures ‘strategy is memory’. (OK, I’m taking this all as a wide catch-all but I reckon they do join up)
• I love this community organisational framework and particularly the focus on lore. (From Emily Bazalgette’s A regenerative organisational design primer which I’ve had open in a tab for nearly a year as I knew I needed to digest it properly)
• There are some good interviews in Jorge Arango’s This Informed Life podcast. I liked Alex Wright’s about his book Informatica, which in fact is an update of his 2007 book Glut which he spoke about at UX Australia 2009 keynote and and I in turn got to interview Wright about for the interaction design mag Johnny Holland (RIP).
• From the podcast I also discovered Taxonomy Bootcamp which has a whole load of presentations about taxonomies and how to make them land in organisations
• Another good podcast if, like me, you want more discussions about both design and writing: Scratching the Surface podcast. (I discovered this thanks to the Design History Society podcast).
• From back in 2016: why you need two types of content strategists. I’d say these two roles are content designer (or UX writer) and information architect
• Brenda Zimmerman’s Preventing Snapback in systems is a snappy 18 minute video that talks about changing dominant systems. I love how she talks about embracing unknowability, finding attractors to dampen the dominant system, and make sure that there are ongoing resources for listening and engaging (and in particular, doing a few things well rather than too many badly). I also love the idea of ‘safe fail’ (rather than ‘fail safe’) experiments
• Nexer’s case study of working with the Department for Education reminded me that ‘tube map’ activity diagrams are a tool that I used to see back in the day (DWP had a particularly good one) but seem to have disappeared as of late.
• I’ve been interested in metaphor and language ever since I was introduced to Lackoff and Johnson's Metaphors We Live By back in the 2000s. Lena Borodisky’s talk is an excellent introduction to the details of how we are informed by language (actual talk is 1 hour, the remaining time is questions) — ever wonder why the Statue of Liberty is a woman? It’s because ‘liberty’ is gendered female in French. There were also interesting points that we use language and gesture not only socially but to work things through (if an experiment blocks subjects’ ability to do either they tend to do worse). My personal challenge, inspired by an Aboriginal tribe who only uses absolute directions for language is to use my compass app on my phone to be more aware of direction wherever I am.
• And in what gets measured gets valued, data journos The Markup realised that LA’s housing intake system for vulnerable unhoused people was biased to score favour white people. The scoring is now being changed.
• Militant Design Research: A Proposal to Politicize Design Knowledge-making is a good reminder that design isn’t always ‘Western’ and capitalist. This mentions the role of design in Latin America (and interestingly, the role of universities)
• The models, frameworks, and concepts that support the Centre for Public Impact’s learning partnerships — I liked models such as the difference between ‘evidence-based practice’ and ‘practice-based evidence’ and the video on 3 horizons.
• Frances Duncan has a helpful guide for how to deal with a lot of PDFs—it’s not about PDFs as much as workflow.
• I’m a big fan of explicit processes. The agency Wholegrain Digital has a commitment to work with ethical companies and after a few stumbles has created Wholegrain Digital’s ethical screening policy
• “I know no better way to solve a complex problem than to learn it intimately, and the systems it lives or dies in, inside out, until I could document it on the back of my eyelids” — this is in relation to sickness but I love the narrative here about archives and care as well as policy.
• Speaking of complexity: “We must balance not requiring every designer to have clinical licensure and ensuring that trauma-informed work is conducted responsibly”. Rachael Dietkus on trauma-informed design and how designers, like social workers, need to have a scope of work.
• Cedric Chin talks about learning the game and then learning the metagame. To me this reminds me of the apprenticeship model from Dreyfus and Dreyfus where people have to just learn tasks and then later can build on their skills to abstract out what they’re doing and intentionally build on their skills.
• I really liked the five types of problem solving personas in this interview with service designer Arun Joseph Martin. They are: thinker (takes time for decisions), detective (uses data), adventurer (thinks fast and efficient), listener (builds community), and visionary (thinks big picture).
• I came across the Karpman’s Drama Triangle when I learned about Clean Language (an aside: anyone up for A Northern Taste of Clean in Liverpool July this year?). For those that don’t know of it, Tutty Taygerly gives an introduction to the drama triangle and conflict and how to change it to empowerment
• Other Tomorrow’s report ‘The Expanding Scope of Design’ didn’t have much that I wasn’t aware of already, but I did like the note about ‘deceleration: redefining design’s role in a culture of impatience’
• Allan Chochinov asks ‘What is a “Product Designer,” Now?’ — of the 3 different types he notes, I trained as the first (physical—I even have a Bachelors in Product Design to prove it), worked as the second (digital) and now do stuff relating to the third (systems/operations)
• Marty Cagan lists the root causes of failed transformations — I particularly love ‘looking for love in all of the wrong places’, namely looking for product management leadership from people that have never done product management
• John Mortimer speaks to former civil servant Caroline Slocock about New Public Management (NPM) — video. This is fascinating as Slocock was a fast streamer at the time that Thatcher was bringing in NPM and also working under later governments that chose to retain it. She speaks to its underlying change from government as policy to government as manager of public funds, and some of the unexpected consequences of this approach.
• Tom Dolan has a great working document about roadmaps
• another working document from a few years back: Richard McLean’s governance as a service. It’s fascinating to read the documents from the early 10s about ‘platform and agile’ with plans for agile champions throughout government, and the review of how agile was done in different parts of the private sector.
• and from a few years back Tamara Chehayeb Makarem writes about UX methods for migrating legacy systems (unlike the common strangler pattern needed for tech, when it comes to UX there is the option to run both systems in parallel as an opt-in beta)
• Annie Neimand on how to tell real stories about impact—I like how this highlights the need to not only create a memorable story but also to contextualise it as systemic
• the New York Time’s economics commentator writes how a cultural event older than Islam called majlis may have been the key to breaking the climate change bloc at the Dubai COP28—this was fascinating in how older and forgotten cultures may emerge at key times to help in current challenges
• Speaking of stories, Frederick van Amstel talks about designing relations in prospective design, and how designers need to not only think about alternative presents (rather than alternative futures) but also move towards thinking about relations and with that, concepts such as sustainability, resiliency, equity, solidarity, conviviality, and mobility.
• Gordon Guthrie has been investigating data and law, and suggests that those designing digital gov systems need to unlearn resource-scarcity thinking when saving data (‘CRUD’) and switch to ledgers to help make sure that rules relating to law can be interrogated after the fact.
• Visualising research using framework darwinism: something I’ve tried to articulate before but is summed up well here, is that a portfolio approach (here for frameworks) means not only categorising overarching, primary and secondary stuff but also deprecated and out of scope
• Teresa Torres has techniques for assumption testing
• Whitney Lewis writes on how to make navigation and sub-navigation accessible
• I mentioned forecasting as a practice. Alex Fergani talks about 5 Greatest Pitfalls in Foresight Practice (video) — part of this reminds me of Sophie Dennis’s tests of strategies (“yeah right”, “yes, and” and “so what”) and Sarah Drummond’s suggestions of using experience safaris rather than pre-packaged results
• And from last year’s UX Australia, Penny Goodwin has a great presentation about information architecture and product management

Miscellany

• As we’re into film awards season now some great acceptance speeches have come out—very different but equally refreshing are Samantha Morton for lifetime achievement at the BAFTAs and Pedro Pascal getting best supporting actor at the SAGs
• American Fiction is one of the frontliners for the Oscars, I liked this piece by Andrew Jazprose Hill on American Fiction, the book that inspired it, and the underlying theme of erasing middle class African Americans
• More film stuff: Best Picture films ranked on how good a Muppets version would be. This is just excellent.
• And in other movie news, Madame Web does not sound like a good film but is worth it for Dakota Johnson’s have-it-both-ways performance. (You can see a supercut of some clips from the film).
• I loved the Katherine Heigl rom-com 27 Dresses, and this takes it one notch and is real: the wild life of a professional bridesmaid
• Eminem’s boxes of notes are fascinating. It’s also a reminder that even naturally talented people put in work to the craft, here with the rapper scanning and culling lines. (HT Neil Williams)
• And finally, I fell down a rabbit hole after discovering DJ Cummerband’s uncanny ‘Crazy Together’ mashup of Crazy in Love and Come Together. There are so many, many mindmelting mashups, but special shoutout to Kiss From a Sun, This is the Way America Makes Us Feel, All Circles of Life, Shake It Off (the Perfect Drug), and, for fellow Millennials, Quack in Black (yes, that is Quack as in Ducktales).