42. Group chat

I'm a bit obsessed with what is happening this month with female pop stars. While the big news in the UK is about Taylor Swift's Eras tour, there has been other things emerging like Sabrina Carpenter mixing her real-life relationship with actor into her lyrics, Chappell Roam's queer pop going mainstream, and Charlie xcx going back to her edgy pop with the release of her album Brat. The latter has caught my imagination as the album is decidedly matter of fact in its lyrics—even awkward—and that is intentionally inspired by what the singer would actually say to her friends for example in a group chat. The pinnacle of this is 'Girl, So Confusing', ostensibly about fellow singer Lorde. It gets better though, in that a remix has Lorde not only respond to the lyrics but turn it into an equally confessional acknowledgment of vulnerability, and, ultimately, solidarity. Listen to the original and then the remix in that order.

It highlights a wider discussion about what is means to have spaces to talk honestly about confusion when so many channels are performative (I also think even of Sabrina Carpenter's earlier album called Emails I Can't Send). Where does this slow-form discussion happen in our professions these days? Certainly conferences were often a space for this—maybe not even the conference but the hallway talks and so on—but as more events shutter this becomes less of a place to do so.

Designers definitely need safe spaces to road-test their ideas. From my experience, design education is as much about cultivating this practice as it is about craft skills. I was reminded of this when I attended Northumbria University's annual design graduate show Reveal earlier this month and snapped the poster on the wall about critique. I loved it for being clear about what critique is and isn't, but also more widely about the importance of opportunities to get better at presenting, communicating but even just articulating an idea.

Another such space is the formal debate. Please don't use political debates as an example—I did a lot of debating as a child and the debates I know were a chance to research, dazzle… and above all remember that it's a competition but not personal. Sadly, I don't see formal debates happening much in design, so I was pleasantly surprised when Design Matters Denmark did a proper design debate on Tuesday on the topic of democratising design (including a Newcastle representative: Ade-Lee Adebiyi of SoPost). Aside from a great quote 'you need to know when your design is fire and when it's just a dumpster fire' I also loved Tey Bannerman's analogy of design needing to be like medicine and law and actually force a professional commitment:

And in a final take on group chats, I have been attending a lot of The Sensemakers Club sessions this month (conveniently they are usually 7pm UK time). There have been chats about sensemaking with language, bureaucracy and knowledge management amongst others. It's also stringently run in terms of code of conduct. It is a paid membership but is worth having a peruse if you want to engage with a community of practice.

This month in digital government and design

• I did a talk to the NHSBSA about agile and design. It was a bit rough and needs an edit, but while I get a proper blog post sorted the slides are available.
• I also watched David McCandles' Information is Beautiful: live. You can read a bit more about the actual event on my Medium weeknote. There are some more sessions both virtual and in-person if people are interested.
• Paul Boag on the importance of semantic HTML. One thing that I think is so great about the http://GOV.UK prototype kit and gets missed from designing in Figma etc is giving designers the discipline to understand semantic HTML.
• I liked Intopia’s map of WCAG 2.2 (though do agree with some gov folk saying how it would be better without AAA as that is something of a distraction)
• Lizzie Bruce suggests that we bring information design back as a profession. Related: Rachel Price says that Responsible AI is an IA Skillset, while Bram Wessel talks about IA’s inherent tension with Agile, and NNG does a deep dive on setting up card sorting to avoid bias
• We need co-design supervision, by KA McKercher. Related: Why Employees Who Work Across Silos Get Burned Out, and Lauren Emma Burrows talks about what a feminist recruitment process looks like
• Continuing on ecologies: From Seed to Bloom to Compost: Emma Blomkamp writes about 2 years of running a community of practice and shutting it down
• A study from Santa Fe institute on hierarchies and organisations: “in most scenarios, teams with a hierarchical structure performed better than those without, with one crucial caveat: workers must have the autonomy to judge the manager’s input when deciding what to do. Worker autonomy, the study finds, allows a hierarchical organization to learn”.
• Martin Tomitisch and Steve Baty on going beyond ‘good design’: ‘Studies of non-violent protests show it only takes 3.5 percent of the population to start a movement. By embedding the strategic design tactics into the work we do, we contribute to achieving the threshold for positive change.’
• I really like that UCL Press is making some of their books available online for free, for example Guilherme Orlandini Heurich’s Coderspeak
  on the language of Ruby programmers. (In comparison, I’m not sure if I can justify paying for these books on Collective Intelligence in Open Policymaking and Behavioural Decision Analysis, as good as they seem)
• Speaking of making things open to make them better — from 2025 all Japanese research that gets government funding will have to be available in an open-access repository. There are some smart workarounds here, namely that the work will be pre-published (which for most who aren’t working academics doing reports, is probably enough).
• Barath Raghavan and Bruce Schneier talk Seeing Like a Data Structure (which also makes me think of Joel Polsky’s Law of Leaky Abstractions from way back in 2002). On a more positive take on narrative: Baltimore has a chief storyteller
• Lisa Malli talks about boring magic in relation to delivering policy in North American government.
• Cennydd Bowles taught technology ethics to US postgraduate student for six months and has generously released his syllabus
• RGA meming what it’s like to find unwanted AI on your phone . Finally, f you are in the UK and into AI in the government area, you should probably subscribe to the civic AI newsletter

Miscellany

• I’ve been avidly listening to the Julia Louis-Dreyfus podcast Wiser Than Me. Not only is it great, but as I hear Louis-Dreyfus gamely shill menopause products, glasses and outdoor furniture, I think about how Carrie Bradshaw was too squeamish to promote a vagina product on herpodcast
• The TV show The Bear isn’t about food, it’s about unhealed trauma
• The best example of ‘the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed’