43. Rest

Election and outages and Olympics, oh my! I started the month with a week off that I then ended up using to write blog posts (more on that in a bit) and then just felt very very tired.

Serendipitously someone introduced me to the book Rest is Resistance and it’s been interesting to read while feeling worn out. While I wish the beginning had spoken a bit more to privilege (giving up everything and moving to ones’ parents isn’t a guaranteed option for all) after this it includes a lot of practical considerations about practically incorporating rest into one’s life.

Which is a good segue for: I’ve handed in my notice at my current job as it’s time for a change (and probably a bit of a rest), possibly away from perm work for a bit. I am at my current job until early October, I am exploring public sector contracts but do talk to me if there is anything interesting that needs interaction design expertise and is doable from Newcastle (after a lot of long commutes in the last few years I need a break from that!)

This month in digital government and design

• A lot of stuff about information architecture this month - I wrote about its history on this website (and then did a less-gov centric version on Medium), and Donna Spencer has written an excellent blog post on information architecture core concepts
• Longtime readers will know I care a lot about histories and transparency. David Mann wrote about how government needs to draw on the power of institutional memory, Ross Ferguson on the need for UK government to return to public backlogs (though I did find the 3 private sector examples pointed in that one is massive, one open source, and the other policy/activism). One example of why multiple perspectives are important: some stuff about GOV.UK Registers and another perspective on the project (complicated things are complicated). Meanwhile, on the more practical bent, Terrence Eden gets talks about skipping blogs and using Github issues instead, and Xander Harrison does a 2024 map of communication patterns in the GOV.UK Pay team. And finally, Sarah Gold of Projects By If talks about how services can earn trust by making claims verifiable
• Speaking of time: Jason Mesut and Liz Bacon write about 24 years of UX career matricies and in another blast from the past: Jess Holbrook of Google wrote about human centred machine learning back in 2017 before it was cool. I like the point about getting people to bring in their own data (with pre-warning and consent) to try out
• The US Inland Revenue Service 'cautious' roll out of Direct File is a triumph for controlled beta launch (the thing that the UK Service Standard insists on for good reason). Also in the theme of being careful and fixing things: Jennifer Pahkla shows that sometimes a discovery needs another discovery (a reminder that not all things are linear). Related: Stephen Hale on how to prepare for discovery
• Home Office has written some good guidance about designing for people that speak limited English. I knew that there were issues with phrases such as ‘fill in’ or ‘carry out’ that did not translate well, but found out the actual phrase for these is ‘phrasal verbs’ (verbs that change meaning when put together in a phrase)
• Stephanie Coulshed of Scope writes about designing content for conflicting access needs — for example giving multiple examples of disabilities so that people recognised themselves and knew it related to them.
• Rochelle Gold writes about inclusive design in health. Interestingly NHS England have just hired their first Inclusive Design Lead. I was discussing with a colleague how often accessibility specialists end up also doing inclusive design work when in fact splitting the roles between technical accessibility and inclusive design might allow for more practical specialisation. Related: over in Australia Meld Studios used co-design to improve processes in emergency departments. And on the technical accessibility theme: if you are involved with the accessibility of services made on GOV.UK Frontend you should try out Adam Liptrot's 'pattern checker' Chrome extension.
• I enjoyed this training on LinkedIn Learning about trauma informed design. The two particularly interesting things: doing a positionality exercise to check where there are gaps in people’s lived experience, and also using them old-skool HCI principles from the 90s as people have not changed that much. (I was also tickled to hear “as per my CHI article” in an industry context for the first time in maybe a decade?)
• Over on the content design side, Five ways being a carer makes me a better content designer by Alison Evans
• Brian Kardell suggests a global design system… that sounds a like a similar process to the GOV.UK Design System!
• ANZSOG summarises about how ministers (usually) have one of 6 learning styles - useful right now maybe?
• Adrian Howard writes about the user research sweet spot relating to who does it. I did question if the people should be renamed to be be ‘specialist’ versus ‘nonspecialist’. This also reminds me of a piece I recently revisited about how co-production with categories of ‘professional’ vs ‘service users’ can be unhelpfully binary.
• Cameron Tonkinwise has written about overlooked technology movements such as the ahead-of-its-time work in 1970s socialist Chile before it was derailed by the CIA-supported Pinochet dictatorship. He also mentioned how computing could be described as tool, butler, or artist, and these differing metaphors infer different design patterns.

Miscellany

• Ian Ames writes about going contracting.
• I went to a book club reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson. I had this on audiobook and have to admit that I had to start skipping sections as the harrowing material was relentless in my ears, even at 2x speed. (I had a similar issue getting through Caroline Criado Perez’s Invisible Women). Wilkerson has come across something original and useful in using the framing of castes—a system based on a particular (potentially arbitrary) set of beliefs that deny social mobility or even social mixing based on particular traits, which manifested in India, the USA and also Nazi Germany (who she shows modelled their systems on the USA). While the book doesn’t quite decide if it’s about really about her experiences trying on this theory, really showing the Black American experience through this lens, using that thesis as a global idea, it’s certainly a valuable contribution to race and general equity and inclusion discourse.
• I finished the book Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma, about what it means to love the great work of a terrible person. I was thrilled to see it vindicate both Lolita (actually about the titular character in her absence) and Woody Allen's Annie Hall (while rightly saying that Manhattan however is not forgivable).
• On a completely different type of book: Julia Fox's Down the Drain is wild, in a very particular 90s under-supervised New York kid kinda way. I did have to temporarily stop when she was being near held at house arrest by her gangster boyfriend (when she was only 15!) but it's a compelling listen, and validated my sense that she really understands art and performance in a way that she isn't always given credit for.
• What is Brat Green? (also I loved that Elaine from Seinfield was there way before anyone else though back then it was called 'toxic waste green')
• Finally - Stephen Nedoroscik ('Mr Pomel Horse' of the US Olympics team) is just Clark Kent goals really