Weeknotes S17 Ep 13

Why do I feel so useless?

Ok it’s been a bit of a tough week. I think, 7 weeks since leaving SF, it’s finally felt like a slog, like the pace has slowed and I’m feeling less certain about things. The market is sluggish, and I’m wondering what I need to do next. This is probably the first week I’ve been in a bit of a funk.

I started off the week with some stuff I needed to do, there is a possible role on the table for me but I needed to do some research and some thinking about it and get back to the person with a possible approach. So my Monday was spent doing that and getting back to them.

On Tuesday I couldn’t think of anything to do, no blogs were forthcoming and I was waiting for a response, so I basically ended up binge watching all of The Dropout and continuing with my cross stitch project.

I did watch a webinar from Experience Haus about portfolios. It was useful but I wasn’t in the best frame of mind for it and it made me feel slightly worse. One thing I hadn’t really fully considered was the need for a PDF portfolio as much as a web portfolio. We tend to think that everything needs to exist online but in reality (I’m sure this is right) having a portfolio in someones inbox or saved in a drive is obviously really important too.

Recently when I was working on my website I was reminded about how I’d used a service like Canva to produce social media assets. It had been fun and I’d forgotten that I ever did it (because hello I’m not a designer and clearly designing in Canva or similar “doesn’t count” because my inner gremlin is not only horrible but is also a snob).

Assets I produced for the OTG Suicide Prevention event in 2020

Anyway, I thought I’d try and learn a new tool, so I started exploring Adobe Spark, and started trying to create a portfolio. I spent a lot of time thinking about what my style is, what I want to get across and how best to show different aspects of my work. It feels very different to design a PDF than my website. The website feels much more like a cut and dried content input exercise whereas this feels like it requires more which is kind of odd considering in both instances I’m working with a template.

I wonder if this is a kind of subconscious reverence for graphic design and print media (actually this isn’t subconscious, I definitely have this) over and above web. Or maybe it’s that being able to update and iterate on the web is so much less friction I feel less precious about it. Who knows.

Anyway, I also learned on the webinar that you should have skills included in your portfolio. It’s interesting because in the first iteration of my portfolio had a focus on demonstrating the outputs of methods, almost to prove that I’d done them, but also as a way of demonstrating skills. But then I had advice to be more expansive with case studies and I can see why because skills feels slightly reductive (or, that’s not quite the right word… maybe inflexible?) for Service Design work as it’s more fluid and enables you to use a range of tools which help to build up a fuller picture.

I’m going to add this Erika Hall quote again here (I included it in my Experience Haus week 4 write up blog). It’s clearly striking a chord with me at the moment:

“I see design research as a design activity, more than a research activity. What matters most is learning what you need to know in order to make the best possible design decisions within existing constraints. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you uncover anything new, or whether you document what you learn in a specific format. It does matter that you are intentional, conscientious, and ethical at every step.”

Anyway, I took Sarah Drummond’s blog post on essential skills for service designers and tried to use that as a basis for a section about skills. I ended up with something that looks like this:

Image: A screenshot of my skills slide which includes sections of User centred / Defining Solutions / Prototyping / Agile working / Organisational Constraints / Stakeholders and strategy

I did realise that in creating the PDF version though I realised that the web version is pretty wordy, so I’ve had to play with brevity and structure in a way I didn’t need to consider with the website. I’ve got a little way along, with one case study about 80% down.

Image: A series of 3 slides detailing one case study

I tied myself in knots a little bit with it, and when my husband came in to check on me on Wednesday evening I was a hellish grump bag. I was really grateful for Daniel in my Service Design training who mentioned that much of the portfolio advice focuses on UX or other types of portfolio, there isn’t much advice out there for service design portfolios. I was also pleased to know that there is a portfolio session towards the end of the course. It helped me feel a little better about the endeavour. I am kind of working in the dark a little bit, it is hard, but I’ll keep going.

Actually in writing this, I’ve felt super unproductive and useless this week but I see now I have still been putting the work in. It’s just slower than I would like.

Anyway, I decided to do something entirely different on Thursday and met Jenny and her beautiful tiny human at the Zoo. Turns out my brain really really needed a change of scenery and this was a tonic; spending time with a beloved friend and a wonderful little growing mind was very much what I needed.

Anyway, here are some pictures of the penguin house, it started me thinking about semiotics. In a way this is the perfect house for a penguin. It is the design for the idea of a penguin, not an actual chuffing penguin.

Image: the modernist penguin pool in London zoo is a white, blue and red modernist 1930s beauty of architecture (though not very penguin-centred in it’s design)

And what else?

• I wrote up my notes from week 4 of my Service Design training with Experience Haus:

Service Design Training with Experience Haus — Week 4

• I read DfE’s blog post about redesigning the service assessment process and I thought it was awesome.

Making the service assessment process easier and more consistent

• I checked with the team at TPX to see if the panel I was part of last week would be shared on YouTube and apparently due to some technical issues it won’t be. But I think the above fits into one of the opinions that was shared that I have most issue with. There was a feeling expressed that different departments, because of internal assessments, are much harsher in their approach than GDS would be because (it was opined) there was a perception of this being a tick box exercise and something that services have to pass. I have a hard disagree with this point, firstly it wouldn’t make sense to me that departments would be stricter on themselves, and particularly not for internal-facing services, I definitely saw departments being more lenient when I worked in the standards assurance team. But it also obscures a key issue, that there is variance in maturity of assessing across government departments. In part because when the standard was brought in, it wasn’t brought in with stipulations about how departments should incorporate standards assurance as part of their own org design, governance and processes, job roles for assurance weren’t developed and so each department developed, in their own time, approaches to service assurance. So, in part, the work that DfE have done here not only helps DfE, it will help other departments to put more structure around their processes. It will make it easier to demonstrate to those departments who are lagging behind how this can be done. I am, as they say HERE FOR IT. Anyway, here’s a picture of me with a microphone.

Image: Sitting on the TPX Forum panel.

• I saw someone commenting on LinkedIn that they thought weeknotes have become too ‘look at me’ and always too positive, and it made me confused. Every weeknote I read absolutely drips with humanity and humility and learning and it genuinely made me question my sanity for a second. I went and read a load more and my opinion didn’t change. I might not aways understand the content of the work, and I may not always be interested in the content of the work, but I never got a sense that I was just reading the work version of an instagram reel, I felt like I was walking past a house with it’s lights on a curtains open and greedily peered in, learning a little bit about the person’s life. It also got me thinking about the talk I did for Ada’s list way back when, in this I talked about weeknotes as being a practice of reframing situations to learn from them. That means choosing to see different perspectives and not dwell in the negative because it helps us move forward. We really must get past this scarcity mindset where we think that because some people are talking about their work they’re somehow stealing the limelight for others. There is no limelight, attention is not a scarce or finite resource. We all do things our way.

I think that’ll do for now. Till next week. ONWARDS.