Journal
Weeknotes 15
The monthly trip to Heidelberg, a couple of films, dodging ill people, familiarising myself with horrible things like risk registers.
Weeknotes 12
A week note in which I talk about improvements to this website, a very efficient taxi service from Cowbridge on the weekend, and a cycling injury :(
The day I fixed my RSS feeds
I fixed my RSS feeds! Hurray! To be honest I didn't know they were broken until a couple of friends let me quietly know. The surprising thing was the amount of users I'd be neglecting and the amount of subsequent bandwidth this website used since fixing them!
Workflow Improvements With Alfred
Riffing off Robin's post on his improvements using Alfred, I wanted to break down how to do each step.
Diamond discussions
Yesterday, I was pondering on how discussion frameworks can help streamline all sorts of things within design. Discussion guides help keep user research focussed and the results comparable. Kickoff meeting agenda guides can accelerate projects and are designed to uncover project difficulties before you start. The Five Whys is designed to really get to the heart of a problem and help the receiver to work through a potential solution in answering. Diamond discussions is a discussion framework to help you get from A to B to solve problems faster.
Designers are people, too
Design teams in large organisations are scaling faster every year. These are organisations that have heavily invested in design as a differentiator and in doing so are struggling to provide the best management structure and processes to help brilliant designers to do amazing work. My growing fear is that this is at the expense of the work, but also of the health and wellbeing of swathes of designers.
Design muscles
In 1984 my uncle's mother died. She lived in a tiny bungalow at the end of a small street with a long garden leading on to a golf course. It was always raining in 1984. On this day it was drizzling with heavy grey skies. The trees at the end of the garden complaining as much as the adults in the house sorting through a lifetime of stuff.