By Adrián Ortega, content designer at the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales.
With the Service manual launch on hold, I’m now shifting to focus on two new projects: developing AI principles for the Welsh public sector and rethinking our website.
Here are some thoughts and reflections on what I’ve been working on and thinking about over the past couple of weeks:
I’ve been documenting our work on the Service Manual, capturing the what, how, and why behind each decision. Reflecting on our team’s journey, I reminded myself how our experiments with more collaborative and open ways of working aligned with our strategic priorities and ethos as an organisation. It’s a shame our squad was disbanded as embedding real change takes consistent effort that will be harder now. But I’m proud of all we’ve done to champion more collaborative design practices, support other teams, product and services, and reinforce our ethos and values as an organisation. It’s easy to overlook everything we tried to make a positive impact (especially if the results aren’t always clearly visible) in the rush to the next goal.
Are you using AI in your work? Are you worried it will replace any aspects of your role? How do you feel about the future of content design? A few of us have wanted to understand how content designers are feeling about AI, so we've put out a survey today. If you've got views and some time to spare, we'd really appreciate hearing your thoughts. This survey is anonymous, and results will be shared openly in a report. Complete the survey.
Joined Platformland: Richard Pope and Emer Coleman in conversation. Resonated with the call for a shift of mindset around design in the public sector: ‘we need to reforge what public sector design means’, said Pope. I do agree with the person who asked about ‘an approach to design more based on philosophy, a more holistic approach’. This is definitely my approach to my work, and thinking about systems. Broken foundations lead to seemingly random symptoms bubbling up all over the surface.
Sent our little monthly newsletter, this one titled ‘On words as worn-out coins’. If you want to read last month’s: On the debt of communication.
Organised information is organised thinking. This applies to individuals as well as organisations, and beyond. (I won’t be the one arguing against a little bit of chaos though.)
Forms expert Caroline Jarrett gave a brilliant pep talk at Content Club a couple of weeks ago: watch Getting forms right: How better words lead to better results. For some reason, I’ve got a brief cameo at the beginning of the recording - cheers for that, Tom!
We announced our next Content Club Pep talk speaker, agile comms expert, Giles Turnbull will talk to us about how to make invisible work more visible.
The tension between ‘listening to understand’ and pushing for efficiency. I reminded myself of practising ‘listening to understand’: it’s easy to jump straight into ‘telling’ mode (giving advice and opinions) when you’re trying to move things forward and forget that sometimes the most efficient thing to do is to slow down, ask questions and listen attentively to understand deeply. It takes curiosity, empathy and patience, and it can be really, really hard.