The end of the month marked 10 years since I joined GDS.

I feel oddly embarrassed to have worked at the same place that long, but I think that’s just me internalising values about work that I don’t actually believe. If you’re mostly enjoying the work and don’t see anything more interesting elsewhere, why leave?

10 years is a long time though. I’ve been thinking a lot about when I first started. I was already a GDS fanboy – beyond excited to join, terrified I wasn’t going to be good enough. It was a step up. The level of pretty much everyone I worked with was so high and it was a really exciting environment. It was a very critical environment too, in good and bad ways to be honest.

I knew it was round the same time, but didn't realise that I joined less than a month before the Brexit referendum happened. Needless to say, the political context GDS was operating in became less stable for quite a few years. The organisation’s been in stronger and weaker positions at different points in that time, but it’s always attracted amazing people and had really interesting things to work on. I find it a bit overwhelming to think of everyone I’ve worked with in the last 10 years, in GDS and across government. Hundreds of them, all brilliant.

Thank you to the government design community who’ve made work feel less like work and kept me going at various points. And to Ste, Kate and Tim who thankfully saw something in the anxious lad in a yellow jumper sweating across from them in Aviation House just over 10 years ago.

Starting alpha

I wrote in previous months about our discovery on how users manage government communications they receive across different services and channels. Well, alpha is properly underway now. Betty and Sally joined the team and are doing an amazing job already, bringing prototypes, plans and opinions.

I’m doing various bits to make sure we join up with other design work happening, particularly on notifications. The GOV.UK App will fail if people get useless notifications all the time, we need to make sure that doesn’t happen.

Risky assumptions

We’ve been writing down our riskiest assumptions to prioritise which things to tackle first in alpha. In general I like using this method early on to de-risk projects and help you test the most important things earlier. But I find a couple of things hard to work with too.

Firstly, I struggle a bit with the language of it all. You start writing things like “we assume that X will happen”, which often includes things you don’t actually think will happen but need to record somewhere so you don’t miss it. Every ‘risky assumptions’ meeting I’ve ever been in has had people writing things in a different format, I suspect because it sometimes doesn’t match how people actually think about things.

Secondly, through doing lots of service assessments I’ve seen teams use riskiest assumption testing as the main method throughout a discovery/alpha phase, and find that at the end of it they’re not sure what to do next. You end up with all these tests and experiments and answered questions. You know lots about what you’re not going to build. But it doesn’t by itself lead you to a coherent product or service. GESTALT.

I drew this the other day to try and get across how the type of design and research work we do in alpha might change as we progress through it:

Vague and vibes-based but useful for me at least.

Design in the news

Strange South Yorkshire bent to this month’s mainstream design stories.

• Sheffield designer accused of using AI for Eurovision logo
• How Doncaster Sheffield Airport could look when it reopens

Planning

After wrapping up the ‘managing government communications’ discovery, we’ve had a few weeks of planning and trying to get a team together for alpha. We’re pretty much there now, and we’ve got a couple of brilliant designers joining the project from other teams at GDS.

The general plan is to have a couple of streams of work. One’s trying to understand how government departments send messages, digging into the technical infrastructure and policy requirements there. And the other is looking at how the future experience of receiving messages from government should look like, in a more joined-up app-based world. Somewhere in amongst all that is how notifications and reminders work too.

Prototyping native apps

Linkedin/Bluesky is currently awash with people using AI to make small, single application web apps and prototypes. It’s actually pretty cool to see, albeit plenty of the examples I’ve seen don’t seem worth the water. I wish I had a bit more time for doing this kind of thing.

I’ve been trying to work out how we can use AI to prototype more advanced native experiences for the GOV.UK App, and I haven’t really found anything that compelling. The options seem to be to make React/HTML web apps (which don’t work the same with native accessibility features etc), or to pretty much build a real app using an Apple developer account and get it into Testflight etc. Neither feels ideal, and Figma has loads of shortcomings for this too. Feels like a real gap in the prototyping market, have I missed something?

Design in the news

• Tinder and Zoom offer 'proof of humanity' eye-scans to combat AI
• Google to punish sites that trap people in with back button tricks
• Trump's victory arch design for US capital moves forward

Wrapping up discovery

We did the last round of research on our ‘managing government communications’ discovery earlier in the month, and are now working out how to share what we learned. So I’m currently being an annoying person whizzing around our slide deck removing words and making everything neat.

RSS

I made Claude add RSS functionality to this website. It looks like it works but really I have no idea. So any of you nerds who are into RSS please give it a go and let me know.

A year of parenting

The little one turned one this month. People ask me if it’s gone fast or slow, I don’t know. What is time? But it’s been a magical year. It’s instructive how an experience so joyful and which adds so much love to your life also requires quite a lot of patience and hard work.

Design in the news

As a news-denier I’m not sure why I’m doing this, but I’ve started collecting mainstream news stories that are essentially about design. Here’s some of the things that happened in March 2026.

• Wildlife to replace historical figures on banknotes
• Meta and YouTube found liable in social media addiction trial
• Is this product 'human-made'? The race to establish an AI-free logo
• Father claims Google's AI product fuelled son's delusional spiral
• Misleading weather apps cost attractions thousands
• High street redesign will 'cope with heat and rain'

Showing prototypes in discovery

I’ve been working on a discovery team looking at how people manage the various forms of communication they receive from government. We’re looking at communications about services rather than marketing ‘comms‘’. Like letters telling you to do something or text message updates on a process.

Although it’s a discovery, we’ve been showing a few rough design concepts to user research participants. I was a bit unsure about doing this but it’s been really useful to have a visual provocation to help ask questions and learn about people’s expectations. It’s also helped clarify what the biggest design challenges are likely to be in alpha.

Managing government communications

It’s already clear from the research we’ve done that government services’ communications are fragmented, and that people spend a lot of time and energy keeping on top of things. That’s not a huge surprise. But it’s been really interesting to see all the different ways people manage that, and that even with a system in place, many people still feel that they might have missed something.

So it’s clearly a problem we could help people by intervening in. The complicated part is, of course, the government side of it. There is a reason these communications are so fragmented. I think we’ve only scratched the surface of this so far and are going to need more user researchers/BAs to really get into it.

I worked on Friday 2nd and very few others were, so I used the time to set up a better notetaking and to do list setup. I like to do this every now and then. I lost track of a few things in December which is very not me, so it’s been good to sort that out. Writing at the end of the month, I still haven’t dropped it, so that’s something.

Making

I spent 2025 doing a lot of managerial and strategy work. I’ve always felt this is an important part of my job, and broadly enjoy it. But I’m really missing making things.

I’ve just started working on a new discovery team, looking into how we might help people manage all their government communications. It’s a really small and experienced team, and it’s exciting to be part of it. I’ll probably write some more substantial things about it next month.

LLMs understand things for me

I had to use LLM to understand several pages of content on GOV.UK this month, when registering to pay the ‘High Income Child Benefit Charge’. I was having a hard time understanding ‘adjusted net income’, as well as many of the concepts involved in calculating it. Seeing this kind of thing makes me more convinced of the benefits of employing LLMs in public services, but it makes me a bit nervous as well.

Clearly there’s been a failure here of designing simple policy that people can actually understand, and of expressing that policy clearly. Part of the hope of GOV.UK’s aesthetic (in my opinion) was that by stripping everything back and using plain language, you might shine an unflattering light on policy like this, eventually leading to it being improved. This might have happened in some places, but not nearly enough.

I wonder what happens if we adapt to using a computer-mediator to translate complicated policies for users. Will we go even further into the tendency to create sub-policies, patches and clauses for every single circumstance? Will the UK’s famously very long tax code start to grow exponentially because humans don’t need to understand it anyway? Is that even a problem?

Fancy books

Within a week of each other two very nice design books arrived in the post that I’d backed on crowdfunders ages ago. The Margaret Calvert one is really beautiful and it’s been nice to get more familiar with her less well-known work.

The second isn’t really a book, it’s a faithful reproduction of all of Archigram’s journals (each of which used a different format so it’s no joke reproducing them all). I’ve barely begun to dig into this, and it’s enormous so it’s just been moving around the house looking for a resting place.

Reading

Things I’ve enjoyed reading this month:

• The natural home for AI agents is your Reminders app
• Reconsidering my role (again, forever, apparently)
• What technology takes from us and how to take it back

Honestly the first week back was tough. Going from being out and about with the baby all day to 8 hours a day of screen-based labour. You get un-used to that very quickly.

I’m just going to bullet point this because this month has been a bit scrappy:

• had the end of year design community get-together in London, one of the best for a while and felt optimistic, really nice to see the early impact Colin is having
• planning for next year, hoping to move a few designers onto new teams and projects
• worked on some strategy slides for a presentation that got pushed to next year... so it goes

Asking questions

I mentioned some strategy work I’d been doing – some prodding around and various conversations basically led me to realise that we know where we want to go but are less sure of how to get there. A lot of collaborating across teams is gonna have to happen.

I’ve been fiddling around writing problem statements and making diagrams explaining these problems in a (hopefully) simple way. This sort of thing:

Next thing is to start sharing these around a bit and seeing if they’re a useful way to focus the collaborative work that needs to happen.

Does Liverpool

I’ve been coworking at Does Liverpool a couple of times this last month, mostly to get out of the house without traipsing over to Manchester. It’s a lovely place. I feel more comfortable there than at your average anaesthetised civil service office.

It was very nice to see one of Ben’s Mayku FormBoxes sat in the corner, looking a bit dusty, well-loved, but in pretty good nick nonetheless.

The Cole Palmer test

This idea was birthed at the pub, bear with.

For non-football fans, Cole Palmer is an extremely gifted young attacker who plays for Chelsea and England. He’s become moderately famous outside of football for his gormless interviews, where he seems to epitomise the stereotype of footballers being thick as shit.

He can be a bit inconsistent on the pitch but at his best he is sublime, able to see everything that’s happening in the game and make passes that no one sees coming. He has incredible awareness of space, instinct and technique.

He is a really good illustration of how intelligence comes in different forms.

So I’d like to propose a new test for human-level AGI: the Cole Palmer test. Which is basically - yeah maybe your AI is as smart as having access to an expert in every academic field all at once, but is it as smart as Cole Palmer?

Never present an idea you wouldn’t actually want to do

I think every designer has learnt this at some point. Even so, it’s easy to fall into presenting 3 options for something just because you feel like you have to. It happened again this month when presenting options for how a piece of work could be handled.

I think it comes from wanting to show that you’ve exhaustively considered all the possibilities. Or maybe even thinking that having a rubbish option makes the other ones look good. Don’t do it kids. I’ve had people choose the rubbish option too many times. Or a bit of the rubbish option mixed with the good one. Use whatever control you have of your own destiny!

Design and tech newsletters

I ask my small readership a lot of questions in this note, in the vain hope of response.

I’m wondering if anyone has any good email newsletters they subscribe to about design or tech. I stopped using Instagram (for like the 3rd time), so I no longer have the daily drib-drab of luxury fetish objects to passively thumb through to make me feel like I’m aware of what’s happening out there.

This might just be withdrawal symptoms, but if you do subscribe to anything interesting, let me know.

Ay ay ay

I’ve been delving into so-called AI safety recently. Not in a particularly useful or positive way – deja vu the nuclear-war-escalation-scenario doom loop I fell into after finally watching Threads last year.

This AI 2027 speculative choose-your-adventure was published in April but only reached my luddite eyes a few weeks ago. Jesus. Then I got into reading about ideas like d/acc and it’s hardly got me brimming with excitement about the future.

There’s loads more going on in this area than I’m aware of, but so much of the development of AI is happening in a different world to the one most of us inhabit. I still haven’t read an optimistic account of how AI might pan out that doesn’t seem ludicrously naive. I am very up for reading more. Optimists, where’s your optimism coming from?

Making

I made a few changes to this website recently. I’ve really been enjoying playing around with HTML/CSS/JS again, with some restrained vibe coding on the side.

I’m not sure about the fuzzy blobs that make it look like your screen is broken, they’re sort of cool and sort of annoying at the same time.

I may even get onto publishing some case studies next. They already exist in PDF portfolios. I suppose this is where I should just upload it all to Claude and let it do the work, but I can’t help but feel it’d flatten my voice in the process.

(Obviously there’s a ruddy great contradiction here in light of the previous section. I’m using AI for certain specific tasks because it’s a useful and interesting tool unlike any I’ve used before. Like many I also have anxiety that I’ll get left behind in some way if I don’t learn to exploit it. However, at this moment in time I think that we have far more to lose than we have to gain from it as humans in general. I am part-selfish, scared and confused.)

This isn’t going away any time soon, stay tuned for future updates!

Consumption roundup

• Yowzers by Ben LaMar Gay, a mad, beautiful album full of humanity that I can’t stop listening to
• Different Rooms by Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, a recommendation from Nikin with some lovely textures and arrangements, has a lot more to it than it first seems
• Liverpool Biennial, which we’ve only really dipped into, I’m enjoying the unlikely venues more than the art so far tbh
• Shifty, AC's best in a while IMO
• Confronting & Celebrating the Limits of the Body: Black Sabbath Live at Villa Park, a great non-cynical write-up of Black Sabbath’s last gig (I maintain that Sabbath should be a key source of national pride and that Tony Iommi’s fingertips should be immortalised on a future bank note, suggest this here if you’re with me)
• The transcendent shawarma wrap at Aleppo Restaurant on Lodge Lane, which frankly is disgracefully cheap at £3.50

Building two planes whilst flying them whilst wondering if we actually need a plane let alone two

I’ve had a couple of ‘strategy’ documents open in my browser for the last month that I’ve been working on alongside one another. One’s looking at how to communicate our programme’s strategy in a way that makes sense to the teams within it. The other is looking at the product strategy for one of those teams.

In a way, it should be a good test of how both of these things live together and make sense to their respective audiences. But it’s also a bit of a nightmare because they have very different time horizons and team dynamics to deal with. I’m a designer, so I will naturally try to make all the parts structurally and logically coherent within the greater whole, but this is tremendously easy to overthink. I feel more and more like the task is just ‘come up with something simple and sensible and say it over and over again’.

Time well spent

I’ve probably spent a good 2–3 working days this month struggling to get things done with new internal HR software after the departmental move. This is not good use of time.

One of the few things that makes me feel optimistic about AI is the possibility that it could navigate around the Big IT Hellhole and do things like request leave on my behalf. But then again, I’d like to think I’ve personally achieved general intelligence and I still can’t do it.

Brand

The first signs of the refreshed GOV.UK brand will start to emerge this week. I’m sure there will be strong responses to it in lots of different directions. Be kind and considerate of the people who worked on it and did their best with a difficult brief. The most useful reflections probably won't be made on day one.

I got over to Manchester for a couple of away days – one with the GOV.UK Forms team leads and one with our programme’s design leads. Vertical and horizontal. Not to be too Linkedin about it but I found both of them really energising.

For the Forms lot we came out of it much clearer about our purpose as a group, and planned our work for the next few months: creating a clearer product strategy, reviewing the team structure, and getting better performance data.

For the designers we talked about doing more future-facing work, operating at times more like a design team, and discussed some of the challenges with collaboration across teams.

UCSD

User-centred speculative design. The world needs more acronyms doesn’t it?

Been thinking about this recently. The stuff in the blueprint for modern digital government is going to need us to think more radically about how people will interact with the state in the future.

All design is future-making, but whilst speculative design is about imagining *what could be* (good or bad), user-centred design tends to use *what is* as its starting point. I’m wondering how our designers can lead on longer-term work which sets the direction of things, whilst using a people-first approach and real evidence to inform it. As opposed to technological hype or just *vibes*. If you’ve seen anything good in this area, let me know.

Life

A lazy placeholder section for non-work things. Things are good. We have a very smiley baby who sleeps well most of the time. Even if this weren’t true I would feel very blessed. Sometimes I look over at him after concentrating on something else for a while and he’s just sat there with this lovely contented look on his face and it makes me so happy.

There was also the small matter of carrying him up the road to see the beginning of the Liverpool trophy parade this weekend just been, and it felt like a lot of long-longed-for things all coincided very beautifully.

GOV.UK Forms

Upon returning to work I joined the GOV.UK Forms team, as part of the team’s leadership group. I’ve spent the last couple of weeks having chats with various people on the team, getting an idea of how everyone’s finding things and where they think the product should be going. It’s been hard getting back into the swing of things but I’m getting there now.

Being on a team again

I’m already realising how much I was missing being properly on a team. I spent the last year in a sort of free role, on the edge of lots of different things. I think I did a good job of putting some structure around that and giving myself clear priorities. But trying to influence things from that position with not that much power is really hard, and I had to rely largely on myself for momentum and direction.

I’m 100% on Forms at the moment to get my head into it, I’m hoping I can invest a bit more time in the other platforms in the coming months.

Charlotte, Nikin and I started the month trying to work out if we need to impose any order on the various ways teams are documenting design patterns in GDS. This then veered into resuming an oft-dropped piece of work looking at how Figma could work better across government.

At the moment, each department has its own separate Figma plan, and Figma’s current setup makes it difficult to share work between organisations. All of government seems to be working on duplicates of Joe’s template, which get out of date and misaligned whenever we update anything in the GOV.UK Design System.

We’re linking up with colleagues in departments, who naturally all share the same problem. The people at Figma have so far been pretty open to helping with this, so hopefully it bears some fruit.

Supporting the design community

The design leadership group at GDS is currently working through how best to support the design community, with the challenging constraint of this not being anyone’s main job. We’re going to need to prioritise our efforts carefully, and probably delegate more things to more of the designers. And somehow, amongst all that, make the case for more support for communities.

To be honest the current barrier to this work progressing is the fact that when you put everyone’s calendars together it looks like your screen has broken. I used to scoff at how many ‘away days’ senior leaders go on, tbh now I get it. Maybe it’s time to book in another one.

Working is weird atm

Working whilst waiting for a child to be born is weird as hell. I’ll get into something for an hour and completely forget it’s happening. Then go make a cup of tea and remember that it very much is happening.

Forms

When I return from paternity leave (whenever that is), I’m going to be joining the GOV.UK Forms team. The product’s currently in beta, has over 100 live forms on GOV.UK, and has lots more growing to do so it should be fun. I’m really looking forward to being on a team again, and to working more closely with Agz and Chris (and everyone else obvs).

Reading

I’ve been reading loads so far this year. The combination of a sparse social calendar and grindingly slow trains to Manchester have really sorted me out there.

I polished off Gary Stevenson’s ‘The Trading Game’ in 4 or 5 days. Cracking read. It’s more of a memoir than the sort of economics lessons he does on YouTube. Really funny and fast-paced, and paints an enjoyably unflattering portrait of some of the people he worked with in the City.

On a very different note, ‘Soldier Sailor’ by Claire Kilroy was a beautiful / terrifying meditation on the emotional toil of early parenthood. I’m not sure it was the smartest choice of book for calming any anxieties I personally might have, but it was very good.

Describing something as a ‘meditation on’ sounds really cultured doesn’t it. I’ll be honest, I have no idea what it means.

Another year older

It was my birthday earlier in the month (thank you). It happily fell on a Sunday and took in many of my favourite things: a visit to the aquarium in town, a wine-addled lunch at fancy local spot Belzan, and my approximately 1000th viewing of Michael Mann’s finest, Heat.

In a recent session with my coach Stefan, we talked about how I could be more visible as a leader. One thing I took from it was trying to get back into writing publicly as a way to reflect on my work and process my thoughts.

Weeknotes and blogging have worked really well for me in the past, I’ve just found them quite hard to stick to. It didn’t help that when I last published weeknotes around 2020–21, I decided to use a completely different format every week. Very creative. Not very sustainable. Hopefully a monthly note will feel a bit less forced.

Is doing design in digital less appealing than it used to be?

Maybe ‘fun’ is a more accurate word. I keep thinking about how much the experience of a digital designer has qualitatively changed in the last 5 years. I’m seeing younger designers leaving their jobs so they can do something completely different, go spend less time in front of a screen. I don’t blame them at all. On a bad day I fantasize about the same thing.

Lots of different reasons for this of course: remote/hybrid working; teams spread around the country/world; tools and processes that haven’t really caught up (and may never). There’s not much new to say about the pros and cons of all this.

My early career was characterized by frequent hangovers, anxiety sweats and deep disappointment at the realities of the working world. What kept me going in those years was the enjoyment of learning the craft from some really skilled pros, and working with interesting people from all kinds of different backgrounds.

I think those things are much less satisfying than they used to be. It feels like we’re failing the exact kind of designers we want to hire: community-oriented, creative, collaborative people. Those designers I’m talking about are spending most days alone (whether home or in an office) in front of a big Figma file, dialling into the odd video call, staring at little faces and trying to concentrate… It’s not a lot of fun. And I’m not sure what to do about it.

GDS, but this time it’s GDS

I spent a lot of the last month or so working on things relating to the launch of the ‘new’ GDS and the blueprint for modern digital government. Refreshing our brand, designing supergraphics for the office, making rough mockups of future interactions with government, that sort of thing. A bit like being a junior designer again, but arguably wiser and inarguably older.

Let’s say it was all a faster turnaround than I’d normally like. But we did all the graphic design in-house, and the quality of what we did was really high in the circumstances. Charlotte’s product posters were particularly lovely, hopefully we can get those up on the govdesign Tumblr soon.

Even though you don’t want to work like that all the time, I like to think that each time you pull it off, it shows the value of having a really strong design team in-house (rather than outsourcing to agencies with no context or skin in the game). Huge props to Kuba for organising everyone and pulling it all together.

My life is about to change forever

In one sense, January feels like a good time to restart the habit of writing regular notes. In another sense, it’s a terrible time for me because our baby is due at the end of February. So forgive me if the next few notes are a bit sparse or manic.

Life outside of work has been pretty much all preparing for baby B-T to arrive: decorating, NCT classes (which have been lovely), visits from family and friends, buying shit we need, getting rid of shit we don’t need (any opportunity for a plug).

Time’s felt a bit compressed, but I hope to have a fairly quiet February whilst we await our dear little stranger.

Vicky

The news of the sudden passing of Vicky Teinaki earlier this month was a real shock.

I worked with Vicky on several Design System things over the years. She was a wise and kind person who had so much knowledge and went to a real effort to share it with others. Over the last few weeks it’s been incredible to see how many people’s lives she touched.

Imran in particular wrote a lovely tribute that is really worth reading. Incredibly sad and a huge loss for our community.