May 2025

2 days of 4 people in a little room

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.