46. Regeneration

New month, new job! I'm now at NHS England. For the first time I am also a completely free agent as a contractor.

Having moved public sector organisation (I did say 'departments' and was corrected as NHS England is not a department) several times now, I've come to consider it a bit like the 'regeneration' process of Time Lords (or in my case, Time Lady) in the BBC TV show Doctor Who. For those that aren't familiar with the conceit, when the first Doctor Who left the show the recasting both of the lead and some other characters was turned into a narrative point known as 'regeneration'. And for me it works with my work, the companions and surroundings are different but the underlying narrative history of the place I'm in is also the same. Similarly, I am something of a new person in a new place, but bring my experiences with me.

Some of this may just be my own brand of whimsy (sorry not sorry) but some of this metaphor comes the a quirk of my first government job. When I started I needed to switch between 3 different Google profiles and used a recent picture of me to signify the profile of the new job. When I moved to the next department, I started a tradition of taking a new profile picture to use on my cross-government profiles to officially signal a break. I've continued this so I have discrete memories of different versions of me in different departments (others from cross-gov slack may remember these too):

And for those that are Doctor Who fans, yes every time I move I think about which regeneration I am, for example that right now I ought to be wearing a decorative vegetable… 

Anyway, on to scheduled programming. It's only a couple of weeks in to NHS England and it's an interesting different kind of work (a discovery on preventative health). I'm also in the same programme as two designers that I've wanted to work with for a long time, Ed and Frankie. My suggestion of a design 'supergroup' seems to have had a long tail of chuckles… It has also meant that I've got to play with the NHS Prototype Kit and even get a page live on their documentation about switching from the GOV.UK Prototype Kit (comments welcome).

This month has meant a bit of travel, which meant that I also finished a few audio and physical books.

• Politics Recoded by Aure Schrock tracks the history of Code for America and is an useful companion to founder Jennifer Pahlka's Recoding America. Its roots as a doctoral thesis are clear as I found the multitude of parachuted-in references dizzying, but I was interested in its thesis of that Code for America existing in 3 acts, starting from Jennifer Pahlka’s oh-so-late-00s tech utilitarianism, to an aborted attempt at platforms, to finally doing a 'narrow play' in service design. Schrok also makes an intriguing point about the value of hiring people with unique skills and letting this help shape the organisation (for example highlighting Cyd Harrell in helping Code for America think more both about user-centred design and also design justice). This made me think about how lots of places try to recreate 'opinionated' organisations like the Government Digital Service without seemingly discussing how those opinions got made.
• As Schrock made numerous references to Carl DiSalvo’s Design as Democratic Enquiry, I also bought this book and finished it. The book is made up of several case studies—from smart cities to ‘coding with care’ by tracking street problems to making digital tools for city foraging initiatives—to buttressed by formidable scholarship. Things that stood out to me were the notes about ‘publics’ rather than ‘the general public’, the overwhelming evidence that design in civics will start to encounter political tensions (agonistic is a word used for this process), to the need for some things to not be written down and become official when reporting forces onward action.
• And for something completely different, Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees (translated from German into English by Jane Billinghurst) combines science with the lived experience of a forester. Wohlleben explains that trees live in communities, support each other and—interestingly for those of us that encounter young strivers—deliberately make young saplings grow more slowly as youths, all the better to survive when they are older.

This month in digital government and design

• A few things form last month: I wrote up my International Design in Government notes, and the slides from the Service Design in Government designing truly accessible forms by Caroline Jarrett and me are now available.
• Someone else hitting the writeup mode: Tim Paul has written up both the GDS Services Week AI workshop from earlier this year and what the internet wants from a new Digital Centre for the UK Government
• Kuba Bartwicki talks about user-facing services vs enabling platforms
• GOV.UK publishing teams have quietly released a GOV.UK publishing design guide. I was also interested in their GOV.UK app design history
• Fran Alexander talks about democratising taxonomy work
• Duck Score talks about good friction
• Design Reviewed is archiving graphic design from the last 100 years
• Tristan Ferne from the BBC talks about discovering music. I love the idea of ‘design jogs’
• Benji Stanton suggests some front-end development standards — and front-end development expert Sophie Koonin suggests some conferences to attend
• I am also curious to try out these chartability principles for accessible charts
• I really liked Alba Villanil’s examples of getting consent when doing workshops with children, the traffic light system for talking about topics is one that I think could be used with adults
• Patrick Samson has shared slides for ‘Your user needs are crap! but so were mine’
• the Ministry of Justice has released its prisoner-facing services design principles. Personally, I wonder if “Build trust, show respect, design with data” is too much for a single principle—the original GOV.UK principles were designed to be pithy—so it will be interesting to see if the language changes over time. And speaking of design principles, Mathew Wilson rants about the watering down of design principles
• John Voss writes about ‘Queering Design System thinking’
• “Despite the perception for being digital natives and spending more time online, 18% [of 18–24 year olds in the UK] describe themselves as ‘technophobes’”

Miscellany

• The story behind designing rollercoasters
• When I came back from Finland at the start of the month I brought back a Moomin for my housemate, so I am intrigued by the news that Tove Jansson’s notes about her creations are going to be published for the first time
• My new job has a Kiwi on the team (the first time this has happened in a decade) and after 2 weeks one person I know has said my accent is a lot stronger, so with that in mind, go and look at the top 20 21st century New Zealand TV shows as decided by the Spinoff
• And finally, in another tie in to regeneration this month's memorable film was Alice Lowe's sci-fi rom-com Timestalker, where Lowe's character keeps falling in love with a man who gets her killed, only to reincarnate and it to happen again. It's not perfect, with some issues with consistency of tone and some weirdly fuzzy camera shots, but I forgive its flaws because of Lowe's originality of vision and distinctive style.