Writing
Nineteen pieces, nine of them in two long arguments made in parts. Each argument sits here as one entry, so the list below has twelve.
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All writing
Showing all 12 entries.
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A 3-part argument
Collective intelligence and AI
Three pieces on what individual AI tools do to a group's ability to think together.
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From passive maps to active models: Introducing the Universal Service Graph
Org charts show who manages whom and quietly discard everything else. The Universal Service Graph models a service and its organisation as a connected graph, so the impact of a change can be traced before it is made.
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A 6-part argument
Design capability as a system
Six pieces on why design capability does not scale by hiring.
- 1 Why growing your design team doesn’t grow your impact
- 2 Why your research disappears into the organisation
- 3 Coordination exhaustion: Why the friction is draining your team
- 4 The shape of your teams: When structure fights purpose
- 5 Why ‘speaking the language of the business’ is both necessary and insufficient
- 6 Designing for autonomy: Building capability that lasts
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Personas and journeys in the age of AI
Personas and journeys usually live as documents, slow to update and hard for people or machines to reuse. What changes when they are treated as data, through an open standard for personas, roles and journeys and the tools built on it.
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Service design needs to evolve. Here’s where I think it should go.
Service design has spent fifteen years refining rather than reinventing itself. Four places I think it needs to go next, from closer work with strategy and risk teams to looking past needs towards human flourishing.
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Designing for employee experience vs customer experience: Differences and tips for success
Employee and customer experience should reflect the same values, but designing for them differs. Why I pair personas with role cards, because people aren’t the same as their jobs, and why EX work leans on ecosystem maps more than journeys.
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The Architect of Belief: A short story
Speculative fiction. Riley Solis inherits their father’s company and the secretive AI credited with its breakthroughs, then asks it the obvious question: what are you capable of?
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Affordances and beyond: Shaping mental models in a digital world
If people can’t see how a service or organisation actually works, how can they change it? On interfaces that hide or even contradict the system beneath them, and why generative UI could widen that gap.
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Deceptive patterns and nudges in organisational design
We know deceptive patterns from cancellation flows and pre-ticked boxes. What do they look like inside the organisations we design, in unpublished salary bands, hiring for cultural fit, or the processes nobody gets round to fixing?
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GenAI in CX: Choosing when and where to use GenAI
Two questions for placing generative AI in a customer experience: which moments suit it, and whether it is the right answer for that moment. With a note on cost and energy, where one generated image uses about one phone charge.
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Designing to do and be better
Why I chose psychology over design, what brought me back, and why I’m putting on record that design should make the world better, so people can hold me to it.
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Paths to the future we want: Using speculative design and future cones to change paths
Design often refines what we already have, and the probable future is not the one we want. How future cones and speculative design can widen the vision, and why looking at barriers before enablers helps change the path.
Nothing under that theme yet.