Week 96: Means of production
Lots of, er, political distractions this week. But I mostly managed to focus on finishing up a whole bunch of design-related coding tasks which are too tedious to report here.
So let’s talk about some other topics instead.
Small (not so) boring tools made with AI
In our monthly user-centred design community call this week, we had Joe Julier leading a mini show-and-tell of small tools that he and several other people had made using AI code assistants.
The tool that Joe showed was an interactive dashboard that summarises the different detailed categories of feedback that his service has received through different sources (surveys, support requests, user research and so on), and how they’ve changed over time.
It looks super useful, and hopefully he’ll be writing his own blog post about how it was made and how it’s being used.
Whatever your feelings about AI – and mine are mixed – helping individuals to build small, personal tools seems like an interesting and positive development. If spreadsheets get over-used for far too many tasks (and believe me they are) because that’s all people have access to, then perhaps AI is a gateway drug into helping folk create more appropriate tools using code?
There are of course questions about how scalable, sustainable and maintainable the small boring AI-made tools are, but I’m glad people are experimenting. If nothing else, it proves that you no longer need to buy expensive off-the-shelf software to combine data sources and build a simple dashboard.
Keeping things open, redux
I was pleased to be able to get agreement that prototypes built by teams using the NHS prototype kit can remain open and public on GitHub. These pose no security risk as they are not production code or deployed to production servers. Keeping them open makes it easier for designers to see and reuse it each other’s code across NHS England and the wider NHS family, and helps teams meet service standard 13: use and contribute to open standards, common components and patterns.
Meanwhile the Government Digital Service have published some new cross Government guidance on AI, open code and vulnerability risk in the public sector which argues that private-by-default should not be used to mask under‑resourced maintenance.
Links
- The team building a new digital service for breast screening have announced the name for the their service: ‘Rubie’. Read their design history post to find out what it means.
- I enjoyed this YouTube video about a £2.6 million heist, which is partly about rubbish but also about the digital transformation of government services.
- Coco’s post on the MHCLG blog, From emergency to sustainability: creating Share Homes for Ukraine data got some great coverage from the BBC, highlighting how millions of pounds have been saved by moving a service in-house.
- Fellow ‘nerd-with-a-website’ Steve Messer joined our digital prevention services gang this week, see his weeknote for his first impressions.
- Rebuilding the car tax service in ten weeks in 2014 from Dafydd Vaughan is a great re-telling of moving fast and proving value.
One week to go until half term. I’m hoping the weather gets warmer.