45. Sisu

Hei from Helsinki! I'm here to attend the International Design in Government conference. I got here a bit early, and as I'm a basic tourist, I did my usual thing—a hop on hop off bus tour. Like either a nerd or someone determined to get their money's worth from anything, I also did my usual initial full loop on the bus to get my bearings with a second loop later in the day to properly absorb all of the information. I also took advantage of the related Helsinki sightseeing cruise.

I learned a lot, like how Finland has not one but two official languages (Finnish and Swedish) and that its Parisian-style boulevards are due to that old thing, empire (the Russian one in this case). I also got to see actual icebreakers for real (pictured) as Finland not only uses them to break up the water in winter but is the leading place in the world to make them. I will forever think about this when I am part of an 'icebreaker' activity! However, one thing that I only caught on my second time around on the bus was the phrase sisu. There is seemingly no direct translation into English, but approximates to doggedness or grit and is part of the Finnish national character. The icebreakers might fit into this for one thing.

I'm not sure if I can described this month as a form of personal sisu in relation to caring about design, or just plain old saying yes to a few too many things and running myself ragged. I have spent much of this month running (OK train and bussing) around the UK—Liverpool, London, Edinburgh, a business park in Newcastle, and even here to Finland—mostly for the purposes of furthering my understanding of design. (I did also have to go to Glasgow but that was for work). Certainly I felt perhaps it was too much at the end—I usually start to make mistakes when overstretched, and sure enough I had a scare at Helsinki airport when I mislaid my passports, though thankfully I did find them—so perhaps either this is not an example of sisu, or in fact I just do not have it. Hmm.

This month in digital government and design

Stuff from me:

• Design System Day 2 happened in Liverpool. I have a writeup
• Service Design in Government happened in Edinburgh. I not only attended this but co-presented a workshop with Caroline Jarrett on accessible forms, which seemed to go down well. I have a writeup - as well as a related one about Platformland
• Papercamp returned to London and (you guessed it!) I also have a quick writeup from weeknotes. Phew.

Research:

• Lawton Pybus talks using signal detection theory in UX research (via Jorge)
• I liked Lauren Kelly’s talk on behavioural research
• Lauren Kelly’s talk on behavioural research
• Jim Lewis and Jeff Sauro ask: is there a missing UX site heuristic about clutter?

Content and information architecture:

• Paola Roccuzzo writes about what you’re probably not doing to de-risk your CMS investment
• A lot of good stuff from Jorge Arango this month, from his course on information architecture to information architecture first principles to the difference between information architecture and content strategy
• Matt Webb’s cursor party for his website

Accessibility and front-end design:

• In the deeply nerdy stuff, James Edwards looks as form labels and accessibility.
• The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA) is making efforts to stop frightening users with scary disclaimers—bravo!
• The CDDO has updated guidance about building a robust frontend using progressive enhancement
• Robert Kingett writes about combatting access trauma

Interaction design:

• Nathan Curtis on the fallacy of federated design systems — definitely one where it should be an ‘and’ rather than ‘instead’ of some stable centralisation
• Eriol Fox on how to start with design in your open-source project
• Dave Rupert writes about good forms

Other types of design:

• Matt Webb’s cursor party for his website
• A nice resource is also the archive of graphic design resources
• This month I found out that there is a Sign Design Society. I found this out via the International Institute for Information Design (IIID) Visionplus 2024 Conference . It was through this that I also discovered that there are self-identifying information designers in UK government such as Andrew Barker.

Other digital and government stuff:

• Sanchayan Banerjee, Till Grüne-Yanoff, Peter John and Alice Moseley suggest that putting agency into behavioural public policy means not just using nudges but also boosts to enhance people’s competences to make better decisions; debiasing to encourage people to reduce the tendency for automatic, impulsive responses; and extending nudges to enable citizens to think alongside nudges and evaluate them transparently.
• There’s a sense of icebergs with both user experience and government work, so I did enjoy Gabriel Scheffler and Daniel Walters’ adapting of a social sciences phrase ‘submerged’ to suggest that government administration is submerged in a way that doesn’t help citizens
• What we call data sharing is actually 3 models: open data projects, data collaboratives and data ecoystems.
• John Davidson talks about making good decisions
• John Cutler talks about how software teams are bad at talking about the realities of work away from either heroic or disastrous narratives
• Newpublic have released a digital guide for creating a flourishing Digital public space for your local area
• Kate Tarling has a free ‘silos to services’ email course
• Thea Snow writes about embracing ensembles
• Loved this from Charlotte Fountaine about the maintenance services actually need

Miscellany

• Why we should take awkwardness more seriously
• the middle ground fallacy and how to avoid it
• I love examples of resourcefulness, for example some early 80s TV shows successfully simulating expensive CGI effects through smart modemaking
• I went to see the play Subterranea at Whitley Bay’s little fringe theatre venue that could, Laurels. Set in the Tyneside Metro tunnels after an apocalyptic event, it’s small but with a lot of heart — I really cared about the characters by the end!.
• I'm often curious about the voices behind translated versions of public services (such as the various Hop On Hop Off bus tours I do). One quirky recent example: a Kiwi is the voice of Slovak train announcements.
• I binged Nobody Wants This and it turns out the rom-com series is based on a real story

Until next time,

Vicky