48. Advent

I've had a month of two halves—a busy start including an inspiring programme day in London, and then some extreme relaxing abroad over Christmas. All meaning that this month is a bit light on links and information. Normal service will resume next month.

This month in digital government and design

• I attended Formfest online on the 4th. The videos are now online.
• I also finished reading Writing is Not Magic, It’s Design which has inspired me to have a go with Obsidian.
• My Service Gazette article about service archaeology is online! It was done for the International Design in Government conference in October and is also in the printed edition.
• My former colleague Lori Thomson did an accessibility advent calendar, and as part of it I wrote something about accessible forms and is on day 22
• Imran Hussain writes about the GOV.UK Design system team getting back to making through running a hackday.
• 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
• Jeremy Keith has released Going Offline (his 2018 book about service workers) online for free
• Also free: much of Jon Kolko's books are now online for free. I re-read the 2011 Thoughts on Interaction Design and found it interesting as a time capsule of interaction design still being promoted as a generalist discipline that could be doing service design and user research (which arguably has now been co-opted into product design). That said, much of the content is still relevant today in promoting both understanding of design principles and practising design craft.

Miscellany

I was only away for one week on holiday so didn't so as much book reading as usual. I did finish 2 books:

• The Pattern Seekers seemed to me a bit biased into equating autism with pattern recognition without mentioning other neurodivergent diagnoses like dyslexia (now that I realise the author specialises in autism, I get it)
• I did however get a lot from Tell It Slant: Creating, Refining and Publishing Creative Nonfiction—not only from the various techniques (such as actually reviewing one's prose for quirks of style) to several great examples which I then was able to go through and pull apart technically (turns out a lot of good short essays weave in several types of stories ranging from reportage to remembered to experienced).

A final reason that this month is light: I've been catching up on all forms of video:

• A Canadian friend of mine pointed me to the video series of a crafting influencer and her engineer boyfriend buying an abandoned house in Vancouver and then DIYing their way through some pretty major renovations. I binged all 46 episodes available to date in 2 days as it’s so compelling. The changing quality of light over 10 months made me realise that Vancouver is at a similar latitude to the UK, who knew?
• Meanwhile over on terrestrial TV, Smoggie Queens has a lot of fun local easter eggs for those familiar with North East England's Middlesbrough (whose townsfolk are nicknamed the titular 'smoggies') and I've fallen in love with the long running BBC show The Repair Shop

See you in 2025.