44. Assembling

Recently, the designer Stephen McCarthy bemoaned the number of books about design that are terribly designed. I agree, there are some awful ones out there. My theory is that too many designer-authors who are not trained in editorial design DIY their own book designs and overestimate their transferrable skills! Margins folks, I want more margins. And smaller, more readable text. In fact, Caroline Jarrett's book recommendation Typography: A Short Introduction (which I am in the process of reading) would be a good recommendation to many an aspiring DIY book designer.

With that in mind, I loved reading the newly-released Assembling Tomorrow by Carissa Carter and Scott Doorley. It’s beautiful to look at and has a lot of provocations about futures—design fictions but with enough links back to current practice to not feel too academic (arguably because the authors lead the famed Stanford d.school). I liked the examples of playing with different types of metaphors like trying on clothes. I also took note of having different goals in play: normal goals, non-goals (out of scope) , anti-goals (goals to not do) and safeguards.

I've read a few other books but am going to split these into a new thing for this newsletter—topic sections. Admittedly like all taxonomies there are sticking points—for example, does a piece on accessibility in government go in government or accessibility?—but as they say, all models are wrong but some are useful. And there is more on taxonomies in a bit anyway.

This month in digital government and design

Accessibility and inclusion

• I was alerted late last week to Andrew Hicks’ tube map for navigating WCAG 2.2. On looking at it closer, I liked it (particularly the themes like ‘whole site’) but wanted something more interactive, so have MVPed a Notion board—feel free to use folks! PS: also curious about if some of this may get usurped by Stacey Swinehart Ganderson's upcoming WCAG for Designers: Accessibility Reference manual…
• Joel Snyder has an interesting critique of self-descriptions of appearance in events and how they can actually be awkward for the visually impaired. Suggestions include keeping the description brief (3 points) and only mentioning height or clothing if helpful for a visually impaired person to identify a person, for example at an in-person event.
• Another example of understanding context: silence in meetings can mean at least 1 of 5 broad things, ranging from acquiescence to deviance to diffidence. This means that silence both needs to be allowed in organisations and at times probed into
• I liked this piece by Chris Sutton about testing with screenreader users
• I also missed Luis Montanha’s article from earlier this year about trauma-informed content design
• I also finished the audio-version of Adam Kanane's 2021 book Facilitating Breakthrough. He has done a few books on his years working on social change in tricky political situations and I have listened to them. While this is the most recent and therefore most resolved for those that have read others of his books (including some humble notes about stepping back and letting first nations people use their skills) there is a bit of repetition from earlier books.
• and… I only just discovered there was a WCAG song

Government

• Clara Greo on Equity and Justice: why it matters in UK Government digital services and what we can do about it. Something I'd love to see unpicked is how certain laws explicitly address or even overrule older ones, particularly since England law is sometimes unwritten so based on precedent rather than rules. For examples, what does it mean to have National Insurance number matching (which often begin as Child Benefit references and are then often used as a form of matching system) reconfigured to allow for sex change or intersex characteristics? Does this require a form of statement similar to the wave of accessibility statements that went on services in 2018 to meet the Public Sector Accessibility Duty?
• Make things open, it makes things better: here the US Department of Transportation doing open meetings for the 100 or so people working on FLOW (Freight Logistics Optimisation Works)
• Martin Jordan is leading work in German government to embed accessibility in all disciplines
• Henry Farrell wrote a thoughtful critique of Seeing Like A State’s James Scott. He points to the need for both government and technology to move away from top-down and abstract views and instead look to metis/tacit knowledge and 'rewilding' (ala Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon on rewilding the internet). Related: Dan Hill’s Read ‘Sideways’, by Josh O’Kane is a tantalising look into a lot of stuff he can’t say about the private sector trying to do public sector cos NDA. This has also reminded me that I need to finish reading Katharina Pistor’s The Code of Capital
• Alex Blangry muses about how the loss of librarians in the civil service has led to more forgetting
• Lou Downe notes how libraries are the fallback resource for austerity service design
• Justice Digital experiments with using LLMs to extract lessons from service assessment reports.
• And finally, this month I learned the word ‘kludgeocracy’, from the excellent Jennifer Pahlka. I had been speaking about not talking about tech debt, and I had completely forgotten about the word ‘kludge’ as a known inefficient workaround.

Design and research craft

• I finished reading the 2023 book Taxonomies as edited by Helen Lippell. It has some practical case studies about designing—you guessed it—taxonomies. One nice story was how user behaviour sometimes means breaking the taxonomy, for example that marathons are not a type of running and should exist as a top-level navigation. There are some useful distinctions on things like associated terms compared to misused terms, and the importance of taking leaving teams into account, either as a chance to quickly check what they did and why, or even just use as a chance to review and deprecate terms.
• Think in 4D by Erika Heinz just came out, and in a great reference in line as a type of methods inspiration book.
• I liked Sarah Drummond’s Full Stack Service Design book club when I attended it so am happy to see the recording
• Gotta love some ethnography — back in the mid 2010s, one ethnographer started working at a call centre, Working the Phones is the result
• I liked Rachel Connell’s talk on content ops (though man I wish that the biggest design tooling issue I was facing was instant Figma access 😅 )

• I thought I was up on agile methodologies but I just I learned about Shape Up? On further reading it’s the Basecamp method and a cadence of 3 x 2 week phases per cycle
• I enjoyed Elizabeth Buie’s article on different types of design research — don’t forget that exploring things with design is just as valid as testing it with people!
• Matt Jukes aka Jukesie writing about his love of libraries and formal library science training 
• Meanwhile, Emily Webber has also written about building team memories
• And for some levity: UX Lessons from Winnie the Pooh

Miscellany

• It's been a great summer (for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere) for girl pop—Charli xcx, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter to name a few. There's a lot of branding wormholes to go down as well, such as the careful styling of Carpenter's hair (which also brings up Hollywood Hair theory which also applies to Roan) to how the branding studio Special Offer chose the 'brat' green.
• Sweet Dreams, Sweet Valley High
• I did not have on my bingo card to find a muscly man baking to the Bloodhound Gang's "The Bad Touch" while his pug dog looks on, but here we are.

Until next time,

Vicky