By Adrián Ortega, content designer at the Centre for Digital Public Services in Wales.

⬅️ Read my previous weeknotes

Just back from a week off visiting my family in Galicia, Spain.

It’s a place I’ve visited a lot over the years, and know it relatively well and love it. To me, it’s sort of the Spanish Wales: celtic, green and rainy. So we’ve been traveling around. Beaches, mountains, castles and churches.

But mainly eating drinking vermouth and 1906. Still recovering from that mixed grill that was allegedly for 2 people.

But there you go, while I tried to switch off from work, here are some things I’m thinking about this week.

• The response to the service manual prototype testing was generally great, especially about the content. Considering I’ve been leading on this, the feedback makes me proud. I still think it needs a lot of work after the MVP goes live, but the future of the project is quite unclear at the moment.
• Meaningful, sustainable content output requires strategic structural changes in an organisation. Anything else is just a short-term band-aid.
• Some organisations would benefit from thinking of themselves as ‘knowledge organisations’ and seeing ‘knowledge production’ as a service.
• On that note, the constant need to justify discovery like it wasn’t fundamental but just a ‘nice to have’ could be minimised if we appreciated its knowledge-production value. Discovery can be delivery.
• Watched Content design for how people think and act by Rich Prowse from Content Design London. You can also read his blog post on the topic: Transforming content design: the role of cognition and decision making.
• The definition of digital as a different ‘space’ beyond the constraints of time and space. Do you ever check your phone and when you look up, 20 minutes have passed and you completely forgot where you were? The digital space as ontologically, phenomenologically and experientially different to the physical time-bounded one. Or something, what do I know?.
• To what extent can groups become self-organised, self-motivated and self-mobilised? Can there be no need for someone leading, setting purpose, direction, and motivation?
• Have everything booked now for SD in Gov next month. The programme looks brilliant - so excited!
• I’ve discussed with my interaction design colleague (and friend) the idea of putting together a monthly lecture for each other as an excuse to learn about new things. I think it’d be fun, and we may open it up to other colleagues once we get into the swing of it.
• I’ve been thinking about when it’s appropriate to lead following the improv principle ‘yes, and’, and when it’s more appropriate to put one’s foot down with a loud ‘no’ and a clear boundary.
• I’ve weirdly gotten into gardening lately. Probably an aging thing (and not having children), but I’m finding it quite satisfying to plant and propagate plants, care for them, and see them grow and flourish.
• Also, got back into running again. And in fact, I’m going for a run now - see ya!

⬅️ Read my previous week notes