Good People
Another week where our newest slew of design team folks continue to shine, while those who’ve been around a while continue to act as anchors 💚
As the size of the team grows, the blend of people and the diversity of thinking grows with it, and there’s a real increase in energy across the design community at dxw that can be felt every single week.
This week, Senior Researcher Joanna passed her probation* — it’s always a delight to see the outpouring of appreciation when someone becomes a “fully fledged” member of the crew.
* confirmation this week that we’re not alone in our growing distaste for this terminology came from Harry.
Good Work
It feels like the bit of writing I’ve been pointing people to most lately is this piece by my former FutureGov colleague Alessandra. Increasingly I’m seeing maps talked about as the ultimate goal of a piece of design work. Of course, a map of any kind (service blueprint, roadmap etc etc) is like any other visual artefact; at its most useful when used to achieve consensus, to eliminate ambiguity, and to clarify thinking. A map isn’t the destination; it’s to help you find your way there.
This week saw Israt and Chanelle join an in-progress project with Ofsted, providing interaction and service design support to colleagues there. As is often the case in these scenarios, the first challenge is figuring out how to strike the right balance between slotting smoothly into established ways of working while also providing challenge and a fresh perspective. That or getting onto MS Teams, anyway 😓
In our monthly design forum, Anthony demonstrated an explainer video he’d made to walk through some design decisions in an asynchronous fashion. While our preference will always be to talk people through our thinking “live”, this worked well as an alternative, and certainly trumps sending things over cold and allowing people to make guesses and assumptions about our rationalisation.
I watched one of our delivery teams final show-and-tell of their project this week, and part of it featured Senior Designer Ming explaining how he arrived at his aesthetic design choices in exactly the kind of fashion that demystifies the design process. I always find this kind of thing extremely heartwarming; democratising design is a love of mine and also happens to be one of dxw’s design team principles.
Morrighan and Imran started to design a new bunch of dxw stickers. It’s indicative of the spirit of our team that two folks who don’t describe themselves as graphic designers offered without hesitation to get stuck in when the call went out ❤️
I offered to provide some feedback which I didn’t get around to this week, but am looking forward to rescheduling for the coming week.
Good Stories
Last weekend was the Paris-Roubaix cycle race, and it was the first time a women’s version of the race was held. I tried in the summer to appreciate watching road racing with the TDF but struggled to get my head around tactics, etiquette, etc. I think the multi-day aspect didn’t help either. However, I watched every minute of both days of Paris-Roubaix — women’s on Saturday, men’s on Sunday–and I was absolutely captivated. Consider me now hooked on watching road racing. Finally, I see a purpose for Eurosport!
Huge congratulations to Lizzie Deignan on being the first ever woman to win the event. Shame on the organisers for the discrepancy in prize money (€91,000 for the men’s winner vs. €7,005 for the women’s), and the fact it took over 120 years for there to even be a women’s race.
All this got me even more excited at the prospect of the Women’s Tour Stage 5 passing by the end of my road on Friday! The route meant I could have actually watched them from my home office window, but was compelled to walk the 40 seconds or so to see the peloton cruise by in the flesh. Chapeau!
