39. Paths

I could begin this talking about Robert Frost's 'The Road Not Taken', and how in fact it's not what people think it's about—it's not a 'carpe diem' poem so much as one about post-rationalisation (explained in, of all things, the retired-women-ready-50-Shades Book Club). However, it's a thread in a couple of things I've read this month.

The first is from Fei-Fei Li's The Worlds I See. I'd downloaded the audiobook for some reason and then completely forgotten about why or even what hte book was about, so got a surprise at what ostensibly seemed to be about AI legislation then backpedaled into her childhood in China along with a parallel history of AI). I realised later on that this was a memoir about Li's path to Princeton (buoyed both by a love of physics and the university's connection to that titan of physics, Einstein) then Stanford while edging into AI. What comes through on the book is the long road of twists and turns that can lead to what later feel like a carefully calculated decision.

This is also reiterated in the research of Adam Grant's Hidden Potential, where Grant uses multiple examples to show how people don't so much have abilities but cover a lot of ground to get somewhere. Some good examples from the book were the importance of play and rest (I nearly called this month's update rest as I am in fact taking that now after an exhausting few months), the importance of scaffolding and setting up ways to learn from advisers (though also ignoring when needed - an example being a baseball player creating his own playing style), and knowing how to now being the metaphorical equivalent of a basketball 'ball hog' by asking questions of others. There are many examples of people excelling in a career after setbacks and slow improvements that are heartening to anyone who may feel like they have started behind on a particular career for whatever reason and are trying to forge ahead.

Finally, I read Work Clean by Dan Charmas. Much like the other books, it talks about how chefs often fall into cooking as a career and then slowly and painfully (sometimes literally) work their way up to manage chaos and create beautiful food—and it comes down to mise-en-place, personal organisation and discipline. Some of the tips may be familiar—plan ahead, clean as you go, prioritise—but some were more nuanced, such as separating process work from setup work, measuring if breaks are actual exhaustion or just restlessness, and committing to do some things slowly (even if it’s better than not at all). It’s given me a kick to get back to more start of day organisation

This month in digital government and design

• There have been a few pieces on UCD and government. The positive: Services Week, including the GDS Open Show and Tell. The more reflective: Richard Pope's user-centred design and the rule of law, and consultancies continuing discussions about the service standard such as Valtech's piece on whether the standard needs to be rebooted and TPX Impact's upcoming session about it particularly in relation to non-transactional and B2B services in April.
• World IA Day happened last month and some videos are up from the London meetup which included talks by GDS; and Alan Wilson of Adobe has written about using object maps for work.
• And speaking of GDS, the GOV.UK Design System team have released a password input pattern
• Will governments ever learn? A study of current provision and the key gaps by Geoff Mulligan has some fairly familiar recommendations—bring policy and implementation together, allow for systems thinking, think about the future and so on—however I did like the bits about mobilising and different layers of governance. Same but different: Greg Jordan-Detamore has an intriguing piece on combining business and policy degrees
• Andy Polaine’s recent newsletter update ‘on mediocrity’ is great (tl;dr—design’s boom is rolling back but things are a lot better than they used to be, and there will just be a lot of mediocre work). I also missed a piece that he wrote in 2020 about organisational amnesia.
• Also in the retroactive writing bent: Matt has written up some work from back in 2014 about why user research is important (here with DVLA's 'road tax' service). It's also a reminder of how far along content design has come since then - I have to admit that the screenshots of those pages look painfully dense in a way that probably seemed normal at the time. Related: Erika Hall continues on 'just enough research' with a blog post on how to get around not doing 'enough' research
• In the latest of 'excel runs the world': it's being used to track 20,000 F1 car parts
• There's a free ebook Content Operations At Scale with physical version available later this year.
• Shaun Connor of GDS suggests we take the approach of 'mobile first' to say 'assistive tech first'.Some good examples: the BBC on documenting screen reader experience, and Dave Smyth’s Accessible Numbers.
• Meanwhile, are we seeing the devaluation of front-end development?
• I liked Benjy Stanton's presentation on interaction design things.
• There's a great episode in this month's Reinventing Government podcast about storytelling in government in Scotland, coinciding with a blog post by Thea Snow on this topic. More generally, Abigail Tulenko writes about folklore and philosophy—I loved a lot in this about how we need to open up to different ways of understanding knowledge and meaning, and how folklore allows for context through telling (and is often told by lower status women)
• Caroline Jarrett did a session on using surveys to understand audience insights
• And finally, typographer Margaret Calvert finally got to see Calvert in use at Tyne and Wear Metro, 45 years after the Metro welcoming (and just in time for the release of her M1 watch—*cough* anyone want to get me this for my upcomig birthday?)

Miscellany

• Here in the UK the clocks have just changed. There's a nice piece on the 120+ years of time zone history
• With Olly Alexander releasing his full UK Eurovision 2024 entry Dizzy, I took the time to listen through to the songs so far confirmed for the contest. Alexander’s song is a nice Pet Shop Boys’-esque grower, though I’m not sure if it is big enough for the night. It’s not the only 80s-inspired piece, I enjoyed Spain’s entry Zorra by Nebulossa which is very Kylie. There are some reliably classy entries by Italy (Angelina Mango with La Noia), Ukraine (Alyona Alyona & Jerry Heil with Teresa & Maria) and the I honestly thought that Aiko’s Pedestal for Czechia was Olivia Rodrigo at first! On the more fun side, I love Joost Klein’s happy hardcore and incredibly Dutch Europapa, the 90s random of Finland’s No Rules (though ‘Windows 95 man’ does in fact break the rules of not promoting anything so may have to change his name), and the ‘ouja pop’ art performance of Ireland’s Bambie Thug’s Doomsday Blue. I am rather confused by a Spanish band representing San Marino with 11:11, a metal sound-alike of Gwen Stefani’s What Ya Waiting For?
• Illustrated children's book company Usborne has released its 1980s computer books
• And finally, the Lynsey Lohan rom-com Irish Wish has been released on Netflix and the responses are great from the tech press Irish Wish Is a Crypto-Fascist, AI-Generated Harbinger of Doom and the Irish press "Getting angry with Irish Wish would be like drawing a picture of Dracula and getting scared of it."

Until next month,

Vicky