I don’t often write posts recommending specific sites.  In fact I don’t think I have ever written a post just to recommend a specific site, but I have been meaning to write something about Lauren Currie’s Red Jotter for a while.

Lauren is a designer – but she is a designer of services, somebody who sees and imagines services with a designer’s eye and a designer’s mind.  It’s not a field I feel I know much about, though it’s one I have become much more conscious of recently because of initiatives such as the Design Council’s public service design project, Emily Campbell’s design and society project at the RSA, the work of livework and particularly their make it work project in Sunderland – and less directly and longer ago, I was prompted to think differently by Don Norman’s Design of Everyday Things.

Almost because of all that richness, the thing I value about Red Jotter is the range of things she covers, of the sense I have of her being a guide in a slightly unfamiliar landscape, pointing to the things we all see everyday and helping her readers see them the way she does.  So it’s not that there is a single post or posts that I immediately want to point to, it’s that following what she writes as a whole makes the landscape more familiar.

Today is an auspicious day for Red Jotter:  it is Lauren’s master’s degree show which she is characteristically conducting partly through a Twitter conversation – with an explanation of how it works on the blog.  So congratulations to her – and the hope of more good things to come for the rest of us.