designswarm {thoughts}

Jenny Holtzer’s Truisms (1978-87) I was in the first day of a two day away day at work and I was thinking of Jenny Holtzer’s truisms. They feel true (even if they might not be), which is what’s so cool about them. I think it’s the same for some myths about the NHS and what it is and isn’t good at. It’s sometimes in the eye of the beholder. So I thought I’d imagine what Digital Screening truisms might be (inspired by the 2018 NHS Design Principles of course): Decide what differentiates staff…

Bruegel’s Children’s Games (1560) has some lovely detail if you look closely. There’s a new tech leader in the NHS which means whatever he thinks about design, UCD or designers will probably trickle down at some point. I am listening closely to the signs and this week, he said that things were not as a complicated as he was expecting. I thought that was interesting because it reminded me of a 2017 article someone reshared recently on instagram: At every step and every level there’s an abundance…

I had two classic ‘behind the beat‘ moments this week. The first involved taking the reigns in relation to a runaway situation. The second involved seeing something happen and letting it happen (temporarily). My two Deputy Directors were on leave at the same time for a few days so that temporarily exposed me and other Heads of to the complexities of their work and removed some of the direction we’d normally be given. This is not usually a problem but something escalated and we spent some time…

Woman with Hand in Hair, Lee Miller, 1931. I woke up at 6am so here’s a quick link dump before I head out to work. On existential cringe / reading another Ben Lerner book and one of the characters talks about milieu therapy / Slavenka Drakulić was pretty kick ass and I hope her last book comes out in English some day / on colours you can’t see on screens / putting a hat on a hat is a terrific expression / my friend Scott wrote an excellent essay about trillionaires / if i could afford the tim

Sam Taylor Wood, Still Life (2001) It’s amazing how long a nation can live with a bad idea. And how that idea ages, sours, rots and attracts all sorts of rodents. Of course I’m talking about Brexit. I was ten years younger when I watched the Newcastle results from a hotel room in Anstruther, where I was taking part in a workshop organised by Mozilla with people from all over the world. I would later spend almost £1.5K to get naturalised in January 2018. I learnt how to deal with…

Scene from Requiem for a Dream (2000) I’ve been reminding myself of what Jane Jacobs wrote: “[…] there must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street. The buildings on a street equipped to handle strangers and to insure the safety of both residents and strangers, must be oriented to the street. They cannot turn their backs or blank sides on it and leave it blind.” Everything we do in design is with others, otherwise we would run the…

500 opened tabs on my phone are burning a hole in my pocket so here we go. I was delighted to hear Gener8tion (yes from that amazing video) studied art in Villa Arson which I visited last Christmas / Steven Ahlgren’s photographs of offices in the 90s are iconic / a lovely and deeply depressing visualisation of Guardian Blind Dates / I’m not into horror films but I would start a romcom equivalent of the Nickel Cinema in a heartbeat / my work commute is making me think of buying a train departure…

I’ve figured out that my weeks are like sandwiches. Mondays and Fridays are quiet, while Tuesdays to Thursdays are back to back meetings. With a sample of 3 weeks, is it really a work pattern or a short term trend? That question lingered as I was drawn into a couple of conversations about service patterns. I’ve always been a bit suspicious of any desire to organise and categorise just like I’m suspicious of ‘one size fits all’ t-shirts. More often than not, bespoke experiences (or fitted…

Second week was a short week again. I thought about Ed Ruscha a lot. I sat in some more team check-ins and by virtue of repetition, words start to float up to the surface. I’m spotting patterns but it doesn’t mean they’re service patterns, they’re just activities each team has to develop in a way that reflects their material, informational and computational realities. If we can see like a state, we can also see like a technology administrator. Maybe some things are better thought of as binomial…

I spent a lot of time on dance floors when I was in my 20s and I have been jiving on and off since 2014. Sometimes you go to a night out in a venue you’ve never been to and you’re trying to find your friends either on or off the dance floor. Eventually you get yourself a drink at the bar, find a table to put your bag on, and stand there waiting for the next song to come along so you can join the fun. I spent most of the week in very information dense check-ins with a few teams. Digital…

Sleepers by Sophie Calle Back in the UK on Monday so these might still be orange blossom scented as I’m still in Greece. It’s been almost 20 years since I saw Martin Butler‘s The Girlfriend Experience and I wonder how you might recreate it today / going to have to buy this book about the history of home economics / the story of the dala horse and how to developed is fascinating / I watched a Figma Make tutorial and it’s as if you’d asked me to learn Autocad through keyboard shortcuts alone…

The org chart as I understand it. There’s a strong culture of weeknotes in government and I’ve been reading Frankie and Mike‘s on an off for years. Mine tend to be a mixture of magpieing and professional reflections so let’s see if I feel the need to shape them differently moving forward. To get me in the mood, here’s what I hope I get from my onboarding conversations next week: Draw me an org chart For whatever reason (I blame Microsoft), org charts are hard to get a hold of and tend to hide…

This wonderful interview with Oscar Peterson makes me wonder how we can have deeper conversations about other art forms / I didn’t know about this 1980s BBC segment on women’s wardrobes / this talk about the gender history of dance looks interesting / I should watch this documentary about Mark Fisher / I didn’t know… Continue reading Sunday Scraps #119

These are some high level points I’ll be making at a talk I’m giving in Cambridge next month. It’s about self confidence, anxiety and the weirdness of our times. It’s also based on conversations I have with the 8 or 9 young designers I speak to regularly. A career in design is uncertain by definition.… Continue reading Design and (self) confidence

I’ve been ill this week and found the clip above in a moment of quietude. It makes me so happy because as a part time jiver I’m more and more interested by the lost art of social, synchronised and pleasurable bodily actions (and I don’t think of competitive sports as exactly the same thing).… Continue reading Sunday Scraps #118

It’s that time of the year where things get quiet for a few weeks so I’m trying to match the vibe by keeping my head down in writing. An interesting art piece about heat in data centres / such a fun use of infinite scroll / after new towns, new forests / on tech’s lazy… Continue reading Sunday Scraps #117

It’s sunny today. Makes it all so much more bearable doesn’t it. Well almost. Apparently Churchill got into painting which in turn inspired George Bush Sr. / an early open hardware handheld tablet made in India back in 2002 /  this article on design leadership in AI lost me entirely when it referred to exquisite… Continue reading Sunday Scraps #116