47. Translation

This has been my first full month at the NHS. It also coincided with a long-planned trip to Madrid to attend an agile conference in Spanish.

This was the first time I'd attended something business related in a foreign language and—to be honest—my language skills were basically only just there. I was particularly lucky in that I didn't really need to converse. It did reinforce the value of good presentation skills—talk slowly, don't have too much on a slide, only use metaphors if you will explain them. I'm hoping to remember these points when I do presentations in English!

I am behind in writing up my notes proper for the event (partly as I also got a cold there), but I was intrigued by the number of loan words from agile that came into Spanish. I understood phrases like Scrum coming in (and in fact much of Lean comes from Japanese into English) but phrases like upstream and downstream were surprising to hear untranslated. I was also tickled by 'hack' going into Spanish as the verb 'hackear', for example in the talk 'hackeando la cultura' (hack your culture).

For anyone interested in some basic notes, I have a weeknote with a few details about the CAS conference.

This month in digital government and design

My article context for future designers is up on the Service Gazette publication on Medium! It got delayed as Medium does not lend itself well to table formatting (in fact at all) but is finally here.

I used to the travel to and from Madrid to get through the newly released Talk to the Elephant: Design Learning for Behaviour Change by Julie Dirksen. I thought that this was about the elephant in the room, but it’s not—it’s an analogy of reason and emotion being like a person riding an elephant, and where we only talk to the person. It’s highly relevant to my work, and has some moving examples of behaviour change such as encouraging men to get tested for HIV.

• How can we test our designs with Welsh-speaking users? by Al Robinson (some practical prototype instructions here too). Natural Resource Wales have also been blogging a lot, from Working with another organisation for a more joined-up service by Philip Rookyard to Samantha Evans on creating and then iterating a form so it better meets user needs and organisation goals
• health stuff: I was intrigued by the Scottish Government’s Seeing healthcare from above (another iceberg model after hearing about this at International Design in Government). Related: Wolfe Erikson on The Future of Care for the International Institute for Information Design (IIID) conference. NHS-related: the NHS Design System now has a community resources page (done by the design system team) and a new task list pattern (led by Ed’s work)
• teams and delivery: I missed the beware of the ‘beware the team doughnut’ talk at SD in Gov so am glad that there is a writeup. I also liked Hector Mejia’s triple-track agile delivery model with ‘delivery / experiments / exploration’. Moving more generally to community, Rosie Spinks write about how to build a village.
• a collection of policy and systems designs canvases and tools: Nesta’s Policy Blueprint tool, The Connective Communities regeneration canvas, Social Finance UK navigating system change evaluation, the Collective Imagination narrative strategy tool and the social design cookbook (does require email to get the canvas but a lot can be guessed at from the site). Policy Lab has also written about people-centred and participatory policymaking 
• design system stuff: Imran Hussain writes about the GOV.UK Design system team getting back to making through running a hackday. Ming Chan of dxw has written about the launch of the DfE Regional Services Division design system  and Imran (again) writes about workshopping the dxw design community. From earlier this year: some highlights of Config 2024 videos are Cam Worboy’s The broken promises of design systems (let designers design for good first and then align to the design system, don’t forget expressiveness), Nan Yu’s The heirloom tomato org chart (loved this showing that actual sustainable product work means a funky looking but robust ecosystem — skip to 19:24 if you want to see). I also liked this take from Matt Lane working in NZ local government that design systems and design standards don’t work without accountability.
• other conference stuff: seven takeaways from The Design for Planet festival, and Erin Kissane at the XOXO festival about the covid tracking project and using social web for social good (from ‘building the plane while we’re flying it’ to ‘building the bridge while we’re walking it’) — notes also available. I also attended the ever-excellent Chicago Camps fall session this weekend (loved the session on onboarding documentation!) will share more on this when the videos are available.
• Some accessibility resources: Jared Smith with 25 accessibility tips to celebrate 25 years of Web AIM, Accessible names from the NZ government web guide, and more thoughts about writing alt text for profile pictures and avatars. And in more general access notes, the US Government has published guidance about multilingual glossaries and various UK govermment accessibility people havve written Introducing the Leader’s Guide to Accessibility 
• In a win for industrial designers and accessibility and ergonomics specialists, touchscreen appliances are out, tactile controls are back in.
• Rachel Coldicutt and Matt Dowse ask ‘what good is innovation if it doesn’t work for everyone?’ I particularly liked the iceberg.
• On presenting or writing: 5 presenting principles from iA, Robin Moffatt on blogging for developers (but could be anyone wanting to write about work). More generally, David Cain suggests doing quests rather than goals.
• Sarah Gold writes about public services needing to use feedback better — I like the idea of framing it as data and structuring it as such
• Why Government Projects Fail: A Behavioral Analysis by Johnny Hugill and Richard Llewellyn. Fairly similar to The Blunders of Government a decade earlier, but still a good reminder that projects fail due to bad anchors and misunderstanding the landscape
• Jeremy Keith has released Going Offline (his 2018 book about service workers) online for free
• Are We Too Impatient to Be Intelligent? by Rory Sutherland reminds us that optimising for efficiency misses a lot of other details
• GDS writes about iterating GOV.UK Chat. I was interested in their note about creating a more personable sub-brand for GOV.UK, with a chattier voice and yellow rather than blue which people found more friendly

Other links

• I attended the Tyneside Cinema Dead Good Film Club which showed the ‘death capitalism’ documentary Eternal You. I was struck at the sweeping generalisations from the US tech bros saying that we have no vocabulary for death and grief. This made me think about spirituality and ritual, and this week several articles I have chanced upon address this, from TikTok Catholics to finding new spiritual practices without religion to countercultural magic. Also relating to aging: a different take on patina, what stuffed toys look like after years of love.
• And some more playful stuff: the LA Times writes about restoration videos, The Financial Times has a great 404 page that also acts as an economics primer, and, in possibly one of the best things I’ve seen in a while. researcher Ellen Hawkins talks about doing ‘close readings’ of work ranging from books from antiquity to fantasy film costuming through the medium of biscuit decoration (the work is amazing on its own but the talk shows the thought process).
• Steel Magnolias at 35 on Letterboxd
• Why are cassette and CD players so bulky now? from the Verge
• And finally, Katie Mather on the taxonomy of the British bread roll (the Geordie stottie gets a callout)