Sustained peace

weeknotes

Sep 6

Testing out a new weeknote structure, because working is hard, but open is harder. It’s not always a clear balance between my life at work and school, and so here are 3 of my top-line themes of the week.

Things of note

Building out 2 of the 8 core customer journey steps
Informal validation with the UX discovery team + ongoing product workshops, to really tinker and cement these steps to reflect the learnings of both
Planning a series of customer journey validation sessions with UX/R to be kicked off next week (to co-develop, workshop style)
Some delayed scoping considerations on the risks of keeping health in line with retail (more of a technical implication > design)
Lots of reading, referencing and synthesising literature on all things end-of-life (existing design interventions)

Validations and assumptions

We had all week to pin down half of the customer journeys to be put forward to the client next week. The personas from discovery helped us get as far as core needs, but these journeys now include the granularity of 50+ portfolio epics, lessons from UX discovery and ongoing research work in retail product pages, etc.

It’s strange revisiting a way of developing service blueprints as previously, doing this with government readied me for mass complexity (and as a service designer, the ask of making this legible). The nuances of those services made it highly internal, SME-led and architecture dependent.

As a customer of this own client, I have the luxury of self-researching the service experience without having to ask. This is usually convenient, but bias is always a risk worth noting (as I reflected in my previous role). When you don’t ask, you don’t really know. That is why we are calling these journey validation sessions rather than workshops — knowing our assumptions help us frame better questions.

Lessons from designing for end of life

I have 1 week before I go back to half a month of classes (!) and to ready myself, I’ve been shortlisting key texts to look at for my research themes (end-of-life, mortality engagement, a ‘good’ death). To do this (and because I’m a visual planner), I’ve been mapping this out according to sub-theme, reference, and knowledge gaps. These gaps will then inform the direction of my research activity.

Part Uno involves looking at lessons from designing for end-of-life and thanatosensitivity. Designers engaging with death have been a slow and going challenge, and research has demanded for the integration of siloed disciplines (i.e. medicine, behaviour and design) and systemic thinking to recognise dying as a relational experience (beyond the individual). A lot of these insights have been living in the back of my brain for months but it feels a lot better now to see this in one neat matrix.

A brain and a body

I don’t always like reflecting on my personal life with work but more recently, I’ve been floating the idea of living more openly too (for accountability rather than feedback). Like everyone else, I sometimes compromise my health at the will of work, and like every other time, this never really bodes well. I have this strange inclination to constantly put my body at work to keep pace with my brain. This means training hard and often, rejecting ‘doing nothing’ days and taking it out on others/myself when anything feels physically impossible.

I had a few of these ‘impossible’ moments this week simply due to life and nature, yet it felt more like a mental challenge than physical setback. I’m conscious that there’s an undeniable connection between the mind and body, and sometimes I can’t always have both. As the days are already getting colder and darker, I’m going to prioritise more outdoor time, and plan my activities as much as rest time.