Alpha gorilla

Everybody who has had much to do with the development of government web services knows that there have been failures of imagination, failures of bravery, failures of technique and failures to seize opportunities – as well as successes in the teeth of opposition and incomprehension. Few have had the opportunity to start from scratch (though […]

Alpha conversation

This is how conversations work, or rather how one conversation played out on twitter this morning. Tricky subject, no right answer, constructive discussion.* But perhaps most important of all, those issues are being discussed in public for a government proof of concept which hasn’t yet even been launched. It is that which is more radical […]

Blurred reading

When I was 17, my first proper paid job was in the public library just down the road from the Elephant and Castle. It was the first time I had come across large print books. They had their own section, and there was a huge demand for them. But though it was much more intensely […]

Saturday, Sunday, Monday

  The oddest thing is not a gathering of almost 200 people choosing to spend a Saturday enthusiastically debating how they can use their deep collective knowledge of the workings of public services radically to improve them. That is startling enough, but it’s not the oddest thing. Considerably odder than that is that having spent […]

White elephants or white space?

Public sector organisations have a tendency to be elephantine. I suggested a few days ago that this was at least in part as a result of their size and age, rather than necessarily because being elephantine was limited to the public sector. In a comment on that post, Rik Barker challenged that view: I’ve been […]

The agility of elephants

It is well known that elephants cannot dance. It is less well known why that is. Helpfully, this year’s Royal Institution Christmas Lectures have thrown some light on the subject. Essentially, elephants have big fat legs because as size doubles, mass cubes, so proportionately fatter legs are needed. Mark Miodownik, the lecturer, demonstrated the effect […]

Reality distortion fields

Every person and every organisation has some form of reality distortion field. Some are more severe than others, and according to Stephen Toulouse, Microsoft has a particularly severe version of the problem: The Redmond Reality Distortion Field: The field that influences Microsoft employees and product designers to make wildly incorrect assumptions on the use of […]

Aphorism 40

The patterns are simple, but followed together, they make for a whole that is wiser than the sum of its parts. Go for a walk; cultivate hunches; write everything down, but keep your folders messy; embrace serendipity; make generative mistakes; take on multiple hobbies, frequent coffee houses and other liquid networks; follow the links; let […]

Design Jam

I have written a couple of times about the gap I see between the brilliance of hack days, as exemplified by Rewired State, and the need to build customer needs and user experience into the mix: These projects can get off to a great start using their originators as their own use case, but they […]