40. Imagination

I celebrated my birthday this month. I had a week off and stayed local, which meant I was able to explore local spas and art installations (such as the Baltic's local community outreach work on imagining the future). It also meant that I had a chance to read books both at home and even at the spa with friends.

I was on a data visualisation binge and so revisited David McCandles’ 2009 Visual Miscellany for the first time since it came out (or at least when I had been avidly following the blog). What struck me more than anything from the book was how the late 2000s was a simpler time with hope for technology and hand-created visualisations. As part of this, I looked back at things I'd been writing about online back at the time, found out that infosthetics is no longer a thing (RIP), however Information Is Beautiful is still going strong and in fact has a London live show Tuesday 25 June and some online sessions!) In comparison, Data Action was released in 2022 and far more of this time, for example being at pains to highlight the power involved in making maps and how participants should be involved in the making of the work. As it turned out I was familiar with not only the classic examples (cholera map, tube map and so on) but also many of the newer ones (how online self-reporting of potholes skews to the privileged I believe was one), it has new-to-me examples of data journalism such as mapping air pollution in China before the 2008 Olympics.

A few other books related to imagination and collective action. The core conceit of Jon Alexander’s Citizens is that for centuries people were thought of as subjects, then recently consumers, but that we should be aiming to be citizens. The most interesting part for me was hearing about how Taiwan got to be where it was—not only were there democracy hackers like Audrey Tang, but the government also listened to them. (Speaking of which, Tang and others have an open source book called Plurality). Also related was David Delmar Senties’ What We Build With Power and the need to organise (and, in links rather than books, Sarah Fathallah’s Every Space is Political and Haley Fitzpatrick, Tobias Luthe, and Birger Sevaldson’s methodological pluralism in practice with a great diagram).

I also loved the Othering and Belonging Institute’s Transformative Research Toolkit and in particular the work on archival research as related to participatory action research (namely that it can be useful in countering myths of objectivity but also requires criticality as information may be missing). See also: Stanford’s resources for digital humanities.

This month in digital government and design

I'm not sure if a lot has happened this month or that I've just been catching up on links…

• The interesting AI work in government (actually interesting!) continues, from Tim Paul of GDS demoing how to use AI to transform paper forms to GOV.UK ones to the FCDO triaging 80% of questions to the correct answer (though Tom Loosemore muses about whether the failure demand from 20% of incorrect answers is good enough). Tim also wrote about automation and the Jevons paradox. Somewhat related: Docs as code is a broken promise is also a good reminder of the gulf between an idea and actual working systems
• On the hip thing before AI came along, James Higgott reflects on apps in the public sector. Meanwhile, Don Moyniham bemoans the trend of all tasks done online requiring an account.
• “As a service designer, my role is often to try and help the team to think about the context that the product sits within and be the ‘glue’ between different products” Wales’ CPDS team on creating their service manual
• Over on LinkedIn there has been a great discussion as kicked off by Andy Jones of DfE about the need to always baseline people on why we do user-centred design. Speaking of baselining, Ben Cheetham has revived the prototype for local gov service patterns (even if it only has 2 at present), Emily Webber has written about team taxonomies for digital, data and technology organisations , and the NAO has made a guide to the digital questions senior leaders should ask
• More generally relating to organisations and their histories: David Knott writes about akrasia (weakness of the will) and enterprise tech, Millie Begovic writes about the illusion of control with institutional artifacts of certainty, John Cutler talks fixes and histories and Samantha Cohen describes The Cost of a Conway’s Defect (referring to Conway’s Law in that IT inevitably reflects an organisation’s structures for better or worse and renaming it as Conway's Defect). And to finish things off with a card deck, the Barriers to Service Design in Government — Card Deck also looks good (if a bit too relatable)
• Content posts: great blog post from Amy Noss and Małgorzata Sobecka on user research methods for testing content—I’d love to see more tree tests and cloze tests used as they seem to have got lost in the rush to test prototypes. Meanwhite, Ema Thornhill writes about how tweaking user need formats to better help content designers (bringing in more of jobs to be done formats though they don’t explicitly say this). Credit to the team for really trying out the format so that they could talk about their changes with confidence.
• A bit of information architecture stuff: David McComb talked about information architecture tasks while Figma has created activities for doing information architecture Speaking of architecture, Gordon Ross talks about pre-discovery, how it should really be exploration (which has been mentioned by others) but also most intriguingly about how it could be seen as defining the architecture of the problem.
• Some accessibility links: The Government Digital Service (GDS) has written about making the GOV.UK ID Check app accessible. There's also an excellent piece on Michele Williams on Smashing Magazine about doing accessibility research in an inaccessible ecosystem. And Joel Stroheimer has a nice set guide for forms: common accessibility issues and ways to avoid them
• Following the money: the Department of Levelling UP, Housing and Communities (DLUHC) has written about using user-centred design techniques to consider their digital spend control process. Similarly, Rumman Amin talks about making 'digital front doors' have a light touch and oucome focused pitch deck rather than a business case.
• Last month the School of Being did a designers’ listening circle and wrote up what was discussed- some interesting points about the misunderstanding of co-design and the extra pressures of designing with social crises
• I liked this piece by Lynsey Jane about going beyond good for product at the Financial Times. I particularly liked the way of creating digital information radiators by making stickers, slack emoji and awarding best use of principles each sprint.
• When I was working in London I tried one or two Amazon Fresh stores, and found it weird to just walk out. The documentation on Amazon shutting it down has shown that in true Wizard of Oz style, it was not automated but in fact had people in India just watching shopper’s movements
• Finally, The Creative Bureaucracy Festival is happening this June in Berlin—looks good.

Miscellany

• This month the Yevonde Life in Colour exhibition was in Newcastle. I recommend it if only to see both how much filmed well in the 1930s look just like us, and to marvel at the craft of well executed photography. (I also liked Yevonde’s staunch feminism through suffragism). I also caught the dance Edward Scissorhands (interesting with great leads, though I felt that Time Out last year was fair) and the excellent Six Chick Flicks parody show (also touring the country - this was the first sold out show).
• I had to travel for work, started watching TV in my hotel room and fell in love with Sky Arts shows, from the portrait and landscape painting competitions hosted by Stephen Mangan, to Bill Bailey showing master crafters learning new techniques. What struck me more than anything about these shows was the gentle critique of the works: thoughtful and considered but never mean. It reminded me of Dan Saffer’s wonderful ‘everything I learned about design critique I learned from Tim Gunn [of Parsons and Project Runway]’.
• Speaking of screens, too much screen time (and not enough looking at things far away) is causing childhood myopia
• 25 years after the release of 10 Things I Hate About You, Julia Stiles reflects on the movie’s affect on her career
• A reminder of the power of indigenous knowledge: modern science discovered these ancient artefacts, confirming millennia-old Songlines
• I love these 1950s illustrations of how to use colour in hospitals, schools and factories
• Also retrograde, but not in a good way: women in academia end up doing the academic housework. Studies show that men often deliberately avoid tasks that won’t affect their career.
• And finally, you need the joy in this life of a bulldog on a treadmill (and follow the instructions)