Week 103: Bad services
It’s been another very hot week. And as the weekend approached, my son came down with the traditional end-of-summer-term vomiting bug. He’s fine now, but we all lost a lot of sleep.
Consequently these notes are going to be quite short.
Good Services, Bad Services
I did find some time on Sunday afternoon to sit outside and read Lou Downe’s new book, Bad Services. I enjoyed it. Especially chapter 3, which discusses how design (and policy) cannot be done in isolation from understanding the materials of how services are actually made. There’s also a great section about building a mandate and environment for people to collaborate in.
The book is a sequel of sorts to Lou’s previous book, Good Services.
It got me thinking about all the previous services I’ve worked on. Some were good, some were bad, and some were somewhere in the middle. Which was largely a function of the organisations they belonged to, and decisions made early on.
Improving services is both a long game and a short game. It relies on hard work, people, building connections, and luck. And as Lou says, it helps if you can be an idealistic pragmatist.
Links
- Synthetic research participants: Increasing efficiency or a shortcut to false confidence? by my colleague Kathryn Murphy-Wright
- The portal trap by Cathy Dutton
- Understanding shisha as a different experience of smoking by Michael Watson
- BRCA2 discovery by colleagues Stu Lorente-Cronin and Lasara Denton
- Your risk aversion is riskier by Audree Fletcher
- GBR urgently needs a brand strategy by Thomas Ableman
Been enjoying the World Cup. Come on England!