January 2026

Organising

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:

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