February and March month notes

The leaves are out on the lime tree in my front garden while the temperature keeps yoyoing up and down so no better time to reflect on February and March in our Design team.

Events we spoke at

Our Head of Design Research Imeh Akpan was a panellist on the Public Sector Innovation Conference and Nicole Aleong, one of our Senior Design Researchers, spoke about futures anthropology at Advancing Research in New York.

Services Week

It was Services Week and we ran two sessions with our designers. One of them was a Green Digital Services Hack day with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Harriet Pugh, a Design Lead, helped design and coordinate the event and a lovely video was posted just this week with the highlights:

Learning together

Our designers attended a number of in person and virtual events including:

• In focus: Research at the Design Museum

• RCA Design Masterclass with Don Norman

• Linn’s class on how to write about your design practice 

Once a month, we have an all hands Design Community of Practice meeting I lead and we invite designers at any level to share some skills they think all designers should take on or lessons learnt from one of our client projects. Jimmy Tidey in Design Research shared his thoughts (and a live demo!) on the role of AI in helping sift through local authority documents, mainly pdfs. 

Our Interaction Design practice also shared some training in Figma they developed for other designers as well as fun automations they’ve developed to help designers demo user interactions more quickly. Design Lead Tamara Zakharia ran a session on navigating the ethical dimensions of design and Julie Thiery talked about her takeaways from the Circular Design Week in Kagoshima last year. 

What we’re reading 

Our designers are voracious readers so these are some of the blog posts and books that they’ve shared in the last few months: Thinking differently about doing good, Welcome to AI, The Donut for Urban Development. 

What we’re watching 

To finish on a fun note, we’re following Ron Digao, one of our Design Academy graduates as he looks for authentic Filipino food. Give him a follow, we’re hoping he covers Bristol and Manchester soon. 

As always, if you’d like to talk to us about working with our designers, reach out to Ben Holliday our Chief Design Officer.

This post is part of our ‘month notes’ series, where we share what’s been going on around our teams over the last month. You can read about what we did in January.