32-hour week

It’s a 4-day week for me but I just couldn’t leave without a a baby-weeknote.

What happened

• Sign off on our service blueprint — a huge milestone that marries the work across different agency teams: tech, business, service SMEs, research, leadership etc…!

• This officially kicks off UX, where we start to think about the external flows on the gov site (from guidance pages to the application process)

• Last minute tweaks to some internal sketches of a prototype

• Welcomed our new UX Lead with a lovely handover gift (UXer #3 of the project!) 

• Finally finished organising my note-taking model on Obsidian

• aaaand I’m off to Tokyo!

I read a lot this week

How I Cried in 2022: An Analysis of 365 Days of Personal Data, Yennie Jun

The Cost of Personalization, Humane by Design

Five Future Roles for Designers, Jorge Arango

Play at work, Dave Rupert

How Forrester used Ashby's ideas, Graham Berrisford

So you want an internet of things strategy?, Alexandra Deschamps-Sonsino

In defense of sometimes starting with solutions, Kuba Bartwicki

My last note of my 30s, Molly Wright Steenson

Improving pace of delivery, Steve Messer

One piece at a time

Where do I start?! This week looked more or less like the last: more service design, less UX. Just the way I like it.

Things that happened at work

• Agreed on a high level journey for our service blueprint (a hard earned consensus between a variety of service actors, sometimes 20 at a time)

• Started looking at the deeper-level processes in conjunction with our BAs

• Attended another UR session, this time walking through our prototype now in HTML (looking at task analysis, questioning the content/language, validating IA decisions and accessibility flags)

• Feedback: I've been a lot more consistent this year with asking/providing feedback, but for some reason it's always something I end up procrastinating (the kind of task that demands more soft > hard effort)

If services were a puzzle

Stakeholder management as a service designer is a massively underrated (yet crucial) skill. I'm very lucky to be able to work with someone I look up to greatly as both a mentor and lead — his way of navigating client relationships, however complex and chaotic — has been truly mesmerising!

We've had daily working sessions (sometimes more) to workshop on agreeing a high-level blueprint of our new service. In practice, this sounds more or less straightforward: if I had one piece of a puzzle, you had another, and another person with the final piece — by working together and trying out different angles — surely we should be able to fit all the pieces together, right?

Alas, in reality (in government services) this is much harder to put into practice. What happens if my piece of the lego had an end broken off, or someone doesn't know if their piece is even the right piece from the jigsaw set? What results is a lot of frustration — somehow many attempts later, none of these puzzles seem to fit perfectly altogether — and no one knows why.

I can probably think of a better analogy than jigsaw, but if services were like pieces of an old toy set — used, a few maybe a little broken, but when put together forcibly with other parts — you could just about make out the overall picture.

The picture will do for now, but it won't be perfect, and it's easy to get bogged down on the imperfections of how each team's piece of puzzle isn't fitting quite as well with their neighbour's. But that's perfectly OK, because the big, complex services aren't actually puzzles — these pieces will rupture and repair. They just need to be in the right place to grow and slot into the right corners and holes, and the picture will gain clarity over time.

^ I don't know how service design became a jigsaw analogy, but I could see Lego as being much more on-brand.

Type A travels

It's my last full working week before I head off to Tokyo! As the only planner of the family, I finally put my foot down and handed over this gruelling task to my parents/sister for a first. Of course, _ weeks, reminders and nudges later… no one has contributed to the Google spreadsheet and collaborative note… so my Type A personality is stepping in last minute, of course. Welcome to the life of the oldest child in an Asian family!

Reads that got me through my week

Organising Design (or why you need to care about spreadsheets), Design Swarm

Design revolution in government, Martin Jordan

Toward Porousness in Policy Design, Wild Thinking Studio

• “…policies are ‘windows onto political processes in which actors, agents, concepts and technologies interact with different sites, creating or consolidating new rationalities of governance and regimes of knowledge or power.”

How to build a strategy, not a roadmap, Sepeda Rafael

Improving pace of delivery, Steve Messer

This website is personal (in a good way), David Cox

Meta-life-ing

Where do I start? Work was spread thin between UX, service design and research this week. Since kicking off our new workstream (as a gateway to other services), my brain has mostly been occupied with wrapping itself around workshop findings and translating them into giant blueprints (currently at V3 and going).

What's up?

• Final iterations to a mock up of an internal service (before they enter sandbox, the mockups aren't actually being tested past the first round of UR)

• Observed a really positive external UR session (ft my GDS dilemma from last week)

• Got my hands dirty with some serious service design, observing and capturing workshop drama

• Putting systems thinking in practice, in determining and scaling user types

• Learning to harness metadata to organise my note files (aka Personal Knowledge System)

Service brain-printing

With UR taking up most of the week, I've been supporting our service design lead in developing the initial blueprint for our new service (name, TBC). As 1 of 421 government agencies, like many of our public counterparts, people come to us for a suite of things to do, and these things take time to get done (years), during which relationships are fostered, requiring sub-service tasks like providing information, filling out applications, submitting requests, getting approvals, etc.

There are about 10-15 types of services that people depend on us for, and as far as research stands, most of our users (>90%) know exactly what they need from us. For this majority of external users, we've scaled them by:

• Knowledge: whether they know who we are, our existence

• Intervention: whether they've previously interacted with us

• Experience: whether they've used our service (or are still using) in the past

As for the <10% minority, we've assumed that they have none of the above. How they scale will present different ways of best entry: i.e. some requiring more effort to enter, but less time to wait.

Experienced and knowledgeable users are the tricky part. The idea of this new service is 'one-gateway-to-serve-all', leaving little chance for service shortcuts, in case we decide to change how we intervene with them (ambiguous, but it does happen). As far as the blueprint has taken us (in all onion shapes and forms), most of our time has been spent on relationship logic and identifying patterns, themes, threads. And honestly the more time, the better.

Knowledge overhaul in progress

I've been reading a lot on Second Brains and Personal Knowledge Management lately, to which I've started implementing on my Obsidian. As someone that's always resonated as thinker of systems — it usually starts with a garden of seemingly unrelated ideas — but after 25 years of thinking, I'm deciding no more. I have a lot to experiment, but here's what I've found that's working for me so far:

• Organising folders in a PARA structure (i.e. Projects, Areas, Resources, Archive)

  • Advantage: flexibility of moving around, findability by priority (I have a lot of thoughts on folders here)

  • Disadvantage: a messy archive

• Hierarchical tagging via categories, types and status (i.e. # life/career, # personal/list, # list/draft )

  • Advantage: categories are flexible, and I can relate the same note to multiple categories (i.e. a list of roles I want to apply for can be tagged against all of the above)

  • Disadvantage: requires a lot of passive intuition that I can already predict as a pain to manage in the future

• Ontological linking via relationships (i.e. parent, child, sibling, cousin)

  • Advantage (gamechanger): instead of isolated links, I’m now able to apply context to different relationships, like

    • ‘Masters’ = parent of ‘Thesis’ and ‘Assignments’, and therefore…

    • ‘Thesis’ and ‘Assignments’ = siblings

    • ‘Masters’ and ‘Bachelors’ = cousins

  • Disadvantage: still fleshing out my context (is a cousin a friend, or a friend a cousin?!)

Brain benders of the week

How to build a strategy, not a roadmap, Sepeda Rafael

A global design system, Brad Frost

It's 2023, here is why your web design sucks, Heather Buchel

Scaling the design ladder: Seeing like a designer, Pavel Samsonov

Choose optimism, Steph Ango ⭐️ (aka Obsidian CEO)

File over app, Steph Ango

• ^ Files are forever, and why I’m choosing Obsidian > Evernote, Apple Notes, etc.

Learning new things in Obsidian: in defense of remembering, Nicole van der Hoeven

What’s a sprint if it feels like a marathon?

This week was one of those that felt both short and long at the same time. Lots of R&R, accompanied with short bursts of work, treading carefully outside of burnout. Crotchet has helped, but surprisingly very testing for my ADHD. Maybe I'll stick to Lego.

Highlights, habits and happenings

• Whipped up an internal prototype in time for testing next week

• Updated an external prototype based on UR findings, for another round of testing the week after

• Kicked off a new workstream (a gateway for existing services)

• Started my crotchet journey (it's not going well)

• (Finally) scoping out my thesis research for my project on death

• Tried Cantillon, a Belgian brew

• Is it too late to be wishing people happy new year?

UX thinking hat: on

We kicked off a new workstream this week, which will see a new service that helps users locate the exact service they need from our client. It's meant lots of necessary reprioritisation which has thrown some of us off our feet, slowing down work that's already happening.

It also means we're racing 3 sprints at a time until March, which is going to be intense. I briefly touched on the sprint fatigue stuff last week, and a lot of it is feeling like an endless relay. Still, I can't be more grateful for my lovely team, made up of people I can only describe as fiercely resilient and compassionate. It's been a testing time for everyone (not to mention the short and dark days upon us).

I got to play with a lot of GDS this week too, which is seriously honing my Figma skills and working around design systems. As we're getting a prototype refined for a second round of testing, I've been pouring a lot of time into finding justifications/examples of modified components (i.e. merging tags with summary cards) and answers to questions like: if we make one column sortable, do the rest of the columns in a table follow suit?

New week, more beer

My beer update of the week took me to Indiebeer, where I got to try a friend's hardcore recommendation, the Cantillon Rose. It's a rare find you typically don't see outside of the brewery in Brussels itself (they don't even let you take it beyond the grounds). It's like a thick apple vinegar, a little sour for my liking, but memorable on the tongue. Stouts for life (no better sip for the cold nights).

Minimalist reading

What it’s like to work as a designer in a transformation programme, Kuba Bartwicki

What happened when we stopped having meetings and sending emails, Steve Messer & Xander Harrison

I tracked my life for 4 years, here's what I discovered about myself, Daily Vis

An example of ‘good’ UX not being good enough, Ben Holliday

New year, same friends

Happy 2024, and happy it has been indeed (for the first time in a long time, because of non-work related reasons). I've been spending a lot of time with old friends — the ones that I can be myself around, unrelentlessly so, and in complete surrender. One of my favourite feelings in the books, truly.

Jumping (diving) into the first week of the year

• Constant chase of sprint milestones

• The pain of context switching

• Wireframes on wireframes: translating old workflows and processes into new softwares

Syndrome of an imposter

Working in agile is still very much a new thing for me, which is a daunting feeling to have in a large project. I've been in my role for just over a year, and imposter syndrome has always been an emerging theme. Whilst I’ve pulled myself back from a lot of negativity and workplace anxiety, it still creeps up on me in the face of new challenges.

And challenging it has been this week… in ways that demanded lots of relationship rigour and positive self-encouragement (> hard work and productivity). I could reflect on the wireframes that took up most of my work week, or the mental setbacks of context switching, but I'm conscious that my ‘per-fessional’ journey would make far more of a valuable reflection to look back on (one hopefully with pride). Here are some lessons I've learnt to keep those symptoms at bay:

• Collecting a 'win' jar: as someone that used to depend heavily on validation as a marker for progress, I've realised how praise can dilute in meaning overtime (i.e. feedback that no longer serves you). So I'm shifting my perspective from collecting praise > my interpretation of it.

  • My manager once complimented me for being very driven, to which I took very warmly. It felt like being recognised for working so hard, but that feeling didn’t last very long nor relaxed me any more than I needed to. Looking back, I realise that feeling driven only surfaces when I'm most inspired (like being proactive in networking for projects that interest me).

• 'Fake it till you make it'

• 70/20/10 rule: 70% of my work will be mediocre, and that's okay. 20% will probably suck, and that's okay too, because the 10% will be freaking awesome.

Life is one lifelong WIP indeed.

On fitness

I'm still on a functional fitness hype, and F45 has really helped take the planning out of my exercise for me. 2023 was a year I truly found joy in getting stronger physically, and my sanity will forever be grateful for it. Highly recommend using Classpass or signing up for trials to mix different formats and styles — fitness should feel funky, experimental, easy, exciting and playful (much like most things in life).

Things I took away this week

Workplace anxiety: How to combat imposter syndrome, self doubt and the fear of failure, Asha Newsom

Adapting your content design process to build better relationships, Alysia-Marie Annett

Why I train designers to write, Torrey Podmajersky

The surprising stigma of sobriety, Gill McKay [Video]

Do I really need to call someone about this?

Happy one month of Weeknotes! Nothing major here, just Christmas, 2024 incoming etc. I struggled a bit to post this week, but I realise that progress > perfection. Looking ahead, I want to make an active effort to better my writing voice. I'm conscious that I don't 'write like how I speak' as much as I'd like, so here's to trying harder 💪

Week in a nutshell

• Spent my solo Christmas (spoiler alert: it was lame)

• Learning to take it one day at a time (burnout relief)

• Thesis planning (overwhelmed, excited, jarring)

• Rediscovering cooking (where has my muscle memory gone?)

• Goal setting for the new year (building systems > goals)

• Slow fashion times (thrifting and reselling has become my new pastime)

Picking up the phone call in a digital era...

I've been off all week, so no updates work-wise. Thing is, as a designer, you often find yourself in the shoes of a user (of services). My recent life admin duties took me to HMRC, where I found that I owed money in the last tax year. Long story short, I'm past the deadline to appeal so my last resort is to call to dispute... which I’ve been putting off for quite some time.

The amazing gift of digital government is convenience. Imagine being able to 'file your taxes' — the mundane, unexciting task that comes for us all — with the flexibility of clicks and scrolls you could do with your eyes closed. This is the citizen-centred dream come true, right here in the UK (Government 5.0).

• Story time. Before I left Hong Kong for good in 2022, I was told by my ex-employer I had to visit the tax department to make sure that everything was paid. I ended up spending an entire day in queues, filling out X paper forms and sitting around with an empty stomach before I was told that I didn't even earn enough in the year to reach the minimum tax threshold.

Not that I'm an anti-people — I do believe that in instances like a delayed tax appeal (to no fault but my own) are best served by people, to people. Tasks that demand flexibility and autonomy (i.e. booking an appointment) should absolutely be served digitally. But in bigger and complex services — with unpredictable situations, nuanced possibilities — a phone call might just be your quickest resolution. For now, at least. In an ideal service, unpredictability and nuance should be consistently designed out.

A lot of the time, I hear people being frustrated with websites and bots — when all they want to do is speak to a human — but what I’m actually hearing is in fact, a badly designed service (or one that lacks user-centricity). If you have to resort to speaking to someone (or go beyond the service), you clearly have a problem left unresolved by the service intended for that purpose. And digital doesn’t mean you’re not dealing with people. In fact, you’re likely dealing with the people that put your needs above all, which is exactly what designers champion.

Perhaps that’s why ChatGPT is so popular these days. We crave experiences that are responsive, intuitive and fluid, like a Google search. Digital makes us lazy in a great way. Give it some time; when AI comes for CX I’ll never hear the same complaints again.

Reads of the week

Stark’s 2023 Access­ibility Year in Review

Write like you talk, Wrong Side of Write

Making site search work smarter for users, Steve Messer

Mapping health & care, Tero Väänänen

What do we mean when we talk about services?, Stephanie Marsh

How to Use Systems Thinking to Solve Tough Problems and Get Stuff Done, Ellie Hempen

• If you don't have time to read the article, watch the clip on 'bettering' problems

The Journey to Digital Government, PwC

Festive findings

With Christmas in(coming) full swing, work this week has naturally reflected everybody’s burning desire to head home / switch off / bring out the alcohol / think about literally anything other than work. I swear I'm not a grinch — but as I've mentioned my solo Christmas this year ft. recent burnout — I'm still clueless as to how I plan to unwind for my one week off, much less for Christmas day.

I do however know I'll be cooking myself some pistachio pasta alla nerano and downing a bottle of Lambrusco (random Bologna souvenirs plus lots of leftover zucchini). Maybe have some instant ramen for breakfast. Who knows.

Week in a tiny nutshell

• Kicked off the card sort UR sessions with participants, as mentioned previously

• Talked about useless / 'out of date' frameworks

  • In a world of frameworks, how often do you find journey maps, blueprints and metrics diligently made, only to be never used again? As a team, we had a mini rant about bringing 'dead' frameworks back to life, and whether these efforts have any value at all.

  • Some things are simply better served to tell a story rather than function, and as designers, we need to make a conscious effort to distinguish between usable, functional frameworks VS evocative maps/models/concepts that act as powerful narratives.

• Proud of myself for setting up a personal cashflow on Excel. Don't worry, I'm keeping my promise (no more spreadsheet talk).

Challenges

For context, the purpose of our research was to explore the information architecture of a giant internal service — to be adopted into one giant CRM system. For starters, looking at the navigation.

We figured that users already had a mental model, or way of working, to find the things they need to complete their tasks. Therefore, the approach was validation rather than exploration; we set up a closed cart sort and asked them to group tasks into buckets.

To our surprise, not only did we discover an existing folder structure in place — most users were almost entirely complacent — and for some, even hesitant — to do the card sort. It challenged the purpose of our research: do we simply follow suit and design a navigation based on what already exists?

Whilst designing for familiarity in a service of complexity might make sense, the reality is that it's much harder to translate file organisation into usable, findable navigations. Some reasons why:

• Folders are flexible structures, where names and level of taxonomy can be changed anytime.

• Folders rely on 'navigation' as a way of retrieving information (as opposed to search, which is more of a linguistic process, implying that users lack content consensus/awareness).

• Folders act to conceal information, limiting the workflow by hiding key links between different files/tasks (our design intervention).

• Folder navigation rely on a cognitive path which can always change, or as we've uncovered, looks different for everyone.

Next week in store

I still don't know how I'll spend my next week: is it sad that I plan to continue working? I'm still for lack of better terms…‘working’ on how to unwind, and I feel like it's something I'll trial and error for the rest of my working life.

It's closing the year nicely for me, where I'm ready to start setting some goals.

Reads of the week

Firebreaks on GOV.UK, Alan Wright and Catherine Gordy

What next for digital government and Government as a Platform?, Martin Lugton

Defining services, products and platforms in health & care, Tero Väänänen

Distress and design, Alice Whitehead

• If you don’t have time to read the whole article, skip to the image of the hierarchy of emotional needs.

• “Design is the backdrop to significant life events… Claiming asylum, divorce, medical diagnoses, accusations of crime, large financial transactions: these are the situations in which people most need to be able to effectively navigate services to get the right outcome for them. The services are not a neutral portal – they are the experience: best when they guide, defuse and resolve, worst when they cause additional shame, pain or fear.”

Systems thinking for policymaking, Alyx Slater

Navigation patterns in mobile applications. How to make the right choice?, Ksenia Toloknova

A common language to understand services, Kate Tarling

My love hate relationship with Excel, wrapped

Where did the time go? I feel like I've been on a writing high — lots of things being captured on Obsidian, my new favourite note-taking tool. It's been a haven for unfinished thoughts and bits for my pea-sized brain.

Week in a nutshell

• Accessibility sign off on Excel spreadsheets ✅

• Organised a card sort research activity to validate some IA thinking

• Burn(out) diaries

Lessons/reflections (work)

Last time I'll mention spreadsheets, I swear. But on a note before sign-off, I’ve bore witness to the power of Excel as so much more than just tables and cells. I’ve never been fluent in numbers — anything more than 3 digits scare me — but knowing your way around formula and logic (like code) is essentially turning data > through interactions > into a full experience.

⁠We’ve designed things like complex, interactive finance models and responsive forms on Excel as a collective of tech, content and UX. Sometimes, we use formulas to intentionally show/hide information, and other times, content (language) is better placed for highlighting things.

• i.e. We can formulate to display Cell X only if Cell Y is filled, or use copy like "Fill in the sections below if you have done Z".

As a UX designer on unfamiliar Excel territory, part of my job is to ensure that these interactions make sense, but also that things like colour and type align with these interactions.

• i.e. Error messages formulated to appear should be conditionally formatted as red text. However, even in the absence of errors, "No Error" should also appear as guidance, but conditionally formatted in black.

Also shoutout to the #accessibility community on the GDS Slack channel, for being so proactive in offering words of accessibility wisdom! I really appreciate how the value of design is being recognised in public sector work in the UK. Services should be exactly that — championed by its people, delivered by design. Its distinction lies in its incentive to be non-profit, non-loyalty driving, non-customer converting. We don’t need to be loyal. We only have to be, because we live here. Let’s get shit done and get going.

Challenges

It's been a challenging week beyond spreadsheets, mostly because of burnout. This term has been redefined for me: I've been tired before, exhausted even. But the point of burnout feels so much more than that, incurable with a weekend getaway or rest. I had to take two personal days this week, and still I couldn't help but do some work to stay productive.

But what does it mean to be productive, anyway? Something I've realised is that when people ask me how my day went, I often use productivity as a metric for my day's success: the amount of things I tick off my ever-growing to-do list. Going forwards, I'd like to tweak my mindset a bit, and shift productivity away from work, but also in my well-being, relationships and mood.

Personal anecdote

Which brings me to my weekend mood. I'm finally exploring the famous Bermondsey Beer Mile, where I will be on the hunt for my favourite white stout. I had a taste of this sweet bourbon-aged beer in Hong Kong this summer, and I've been thinking about those unforgettable notes of white chocolate ever since. Highly recommend for anyone who's not a fan of stout (yet), this is a game changer!

Reads of the week

Understanding values: Schwartz theory of basic values, Shalom H. Schwartz

Burnout diaries, Amy Hupe

Loss, Amy Hupe

CECAN Webinar: Demystifying system thinking from within Defra, Dan McGonigle and Betheney Wills [Dec 12]

• So good to see systems thinking in principle and practice! I would have loved to see more of the lessons taken away with value though, some seemed more like obvious outcomes. It’s also unclear in the way it addresses change, as this can look very different for policymakers or fisheries.

Weeknote #9, Richard Walker

• “Just because a product claims to meet a certain standard doesn’t necessarily mean that it does, so don’t take anything at face value.”

• “The more buyers ask about accessibility, and the more demanding they are, the more sellers will pay attention to it and realise that government takes it seriously.”

The why of weeknotes, Sam Villis

• I’m using Weeknotes as an archive for my work, and document progress I’ve made as a designer in her early days. My dad’s favourite Steve Jobs quote: “Stay foolish, stay hungry” (humble).

Design Systems (technically not a read but a lovely library of design systems)

• I do however highly recommend the UX Design Weekly newsletter, and newsletters in general. It’s like a 21st-century version of the morning paper for me.

That’s enough reading for me as I’ve been very preoccupied with this. Then, I have this next on my list.

Finding my way with words

Welcome to my first Weeknote (name TBC, as ChatGPT hasn’t been the most helpful).

I’ve been feeling really inspired lately — having gone back to school, started a really exciting research project, picking up a lot of skills in work, etc. I love this energy but I don’t want to lose it either, which is why I’m going to start capturing my week — as thoughts, reflections, musings, word scribbles — consider it a better placed home for my iPhone notes.

I’ve always loved writing, but this + perfectionism don’t go hand-in-hand. Therefore, my Weeknotes will take on more of a fluid, structure-less experiment, as I build a bigger fortress for more composed thoughts elsewhere (and of course, my Medium blog dedicated to my research project).

Work-life-in-a-week

I’ve been on a government project for 6ish months now, and it still feels like I’m mentally onboarding. Public sector work are big, bad challenges (and I love it). As a UX designer, I’m being tested on Figma everyday and designing for gov.uk — working with one of the most accessible design systems — is no easy feat.

When I’m not designing wireframes, I’ve been making Excel spreadsheets accessible. It’s been interesting. After all, I chose a career in design, precisely to avoid hearing language like “IFA1>Y2=MY”. But 3 weeks of spreadsheets later, I started to appreciate the value of accessibility beyond web (i.e. print). Some things I’ve learnt:

• Blank cells are a no. Not only do screen readers navigate by cell, it confuses other users if they don’t know where tables start and end. This principle directly challenges my UX brain, where we rely on white space for clarity.

  • Screen readers aren’t the only ones who navigate by cell either. During research sessions, I observed less tech-savvy users using their keyboard to move around Excel too. It goes to show that when designing for the 5% — more often than you think, you’re really designing for the 100%.

• Excel accessibility is a niche thing. Different sources contradict each other. This is why I’ve recently joined the Government Digital channel on Slack, which has been such a welcoming, helpful community to learn from! And also where I discovered the existence of International Spreadsheet Day…

• I also had my first dream in Figma today (on a Saturday night). Maybe this is my cue to chill out a bit.

My life outside of work

I recently came back from a weekend in Edinburgh, where I survived the chilly -5°c and hiked Arthur’s Seat! It was my first solo-ish trip: I loved that I was approachable, could do whatever I wanted on my own time, and have officially been hardened for the rest of winter. London’s chill has nothing on me now.

Other notable things of the week:

• I’ve been obsessed with my jump rope — it’s done wonders for my footwork and I can’t stop learning tricks.

• While I’m spending Christmas on my own this year, I’ve been feeling a lot of love by the amount of friends that have invited me to spend the holidays with their families. I’ve never been a really festive person, but I do love Christmas for the reasons of love (also why I make Christmas cards a priority year after year).

• As it’s getting darker, I’ve been putting my walking pad to full use. Sometimes I feel like a hamster on a wheel and I look awkward on calls, but it’s okay, those steps gotta be done.

Reads of the week

Blogging and working in the open, Steve Messer

Letting go of urgency, Wild Thinking Studio

• This one sat with me. We live in a chaotic world, and a lot of us try to just do whatever good we can in it. Sometimes I forget that the world is just another system, and we as observers influence the system as it does us.

Policy design, service design, systems thinking, Wild Thinking Studio

• “For me design offers an approach, what I have defined as ‘purposeful creativity’, which has a lot more in common with policy-making than many might think.”

Navigating Complexity: Unraveling the causal structure of real-world systems, Bioform Labs

The complex relationship between the systems we design and the value they create, Dennus Hambeukers

• “When we release a design, a system, into the world, it takes on a life of its own, users use it in unexpected ways. Design is equal parts intention and surrender.”