/ JOURNAL
Running and not running
When I started running, I was a cyclist.
Cycling had become, for different reasons, a burden to me and those close to me. Spending a quarter of a weekend in the North Downs wasn't ever going to be fair to a partner and two small children, while the more I felt I was expected to care about chainsets, overshoes and frame weight, the less I found myself enjoying cycling.
Running, by contrast, felt immediate, elemental, less consumerist, purer.
In 2014, I ran 187 miles, in 2015 I ran 247.
I became a runner. Not amazing, no special talent, but a thing suited to my physique that I could do well. A thing that gave me joy.
In 2016 I ran 64 miles.
The problems began on one easy-paced run in new running shoes bought with naivety, sold on terrible advice. My right foot flared up after twenty minutes, feeling unbearably swollen as if the tiny bones in the top of my foot were splintered and grinding against each other. I stopped, walked, breathed, then tentatively ran again.
No.
Between then and now there have been many false starts, recurring pain and resistance bands, red wine, black moods and a thickening middle, frustration and physio. But at the same time, I lost a sense of who I was, what I was for. Without running, I lost a balance somewhere.
Injury is the accumulation of small sadnesses. The unexpected twinge walking to the shops, the Garmin watch in an underwear drawer, the unworn running shoes by the front door that remind you that you don't do this anymore. Strava's annual report, a celebration of achievement, instead becomes an exercise in what might have been.
It's unfashionable these days to care about quantified self services like Strava. It has, in some parts, a bad reputation for those who can only see the segment-chasing alpha males. But for the majority of us who'll never see a KOM or QOM and whose only competition is ourselves, Strava is a ledger of quiet achievement. And throughout my time injured, I've continued to find some satisfaction watching my friends' mileage mount, their routes vary, the mile times improve and decline. Of all my social networks, Strava speaks truth more powerfully than all the rest.
For much of the past year I'd accepted that my body was done with running. Finished. And yet, all this time off has served to bring home to me how much running is - for me - about mental health more than physical health. A meditation, an escape, a means of coping. I need to run.
Now, I'm back. Running again, slowly, with caution and patience. Short, flat runs interspersed by physio sessions and learning yoga to belatedly build strength. If I never run more than 12 miles a week, I won't mind, because those 90 minutes a week is all I need to remember who I am.
Principles not platitudes
Jeremy Keith has posted a really good piece on what makes a design principle good, following on from a piece I wrote here about designing design principles.
I say really good because Jeremy's post asks just the right hard questions and pinpoint the nagging worry we've had as we start to identify our own design principles:
‘could you imagine the exact opposite of the design principle being perfectly valid in a different organisation or on a different project? If not, then the principle may be too weak to be effective.’
It's so easy for principles to become platitudes, to become decorative rather than directing our work. We're wary of that and trying to guard against it by working on them in the open. In alpha, sharing them early with colleagues across different bits of the Co-op and inviting their critique; and then in beta, when we start to publish our principles more publicly. These early posts on process are a part of that.
Good principles have to word hard. Scrutiny always helps. Which in turn reminds me of one of GDS's very best design principles:
Designing design principles
It’s eight months since I last posted here, eight months since I joined the team at Co-op Digital. It’s been busy.
One of the real opportunities in this role is to be part of establishing a culture of (digital) design where one didn’t exist, in a team that didn’t exist just over a year ago. Over the course of those eight months, I and the now twenty nine other designers, user researchers and content designers here have been exploring through doing what it really means to design something for the Co-op.
What it looks like, what it feels like. How it should sound, how it should react. What good looks like. We’re just beginning to understand that.
Until now, we’ve done that without a guiding set of design principles, the stars to sail our ship by. We weren’t ready. But we’re beginning to be. As we’ve built a body of work - some internally facing, some external - what has until now been implicit can become explicit.
The digital design team is made up of people from very different backgrounds - a mix of in-house, agency, private and public sector - different levels of experience, different expectations. We’re writing these design principles for ourselves. Not a manifesto, rather a first attempt at putting into words our way of collectively thinking about design, to create a lens through which we can look at our work: what we create and how we create it.
What began as a whiteboard and one marker became a hive-like Google Doc with many worker bees contributing over time, honing the language, adding then paring back, questioning, clarifying.
What we’re building towards is a set of principles, few enough to be memorable, short enough to be repeatable, relevant enough to be usable. When we’re running a design crit, it’s these principles that we want to lean on. When a sole designer in an agile delivery team is talking about a design approach, it’s these principles that back her up.
You’ll find this first attempt all over the walls and windows of our workspaces in Manchester. Outside lifts, along corridors. Simple, monochrome, typographic posters - courtesy of the fantastic Gail Mellows, just one of the many designers to join this year.
We’ve deliberately avoided being too precious, looking too finished. We don’t want people to admire the posters, but to live with them, question them, scribble on them, stick post-it notes on them, and to improve them. These posters are our alpha.
Every new version of the posters is stuck over the version that came before - a real life Track Changes so that we, and our colleagues, can see iteration - one of our principles - in action.
Soon, these principles will move from alpha to beta and they’ll become publicly available. They won’t be the most significant thing we do this year - that, always, is the work we deliver for our users. But slowly, we’re making what was invisible, visible, and understanding what it really means to design for the Co-op.
Understanding every kind of need
‘Our task is to make a new kind of artist, a creator capable of understanding every kind of need: not because he is a prodigy, but he knows how to approach human needs according to a precise method. We wish to make him conscious of his creative power, not scared of new facts, and independent of formulas in his own work.’
— Walter Gropius, Bauhaus prospectus
Same as it ever was. Same as it ever was.
On service assessments
Five hours. Eighteen points.
At HMRC, before at any digital service goes for its full service assessment, whether that’s with GDS or not, we have a pre-assessment. We used to call these ‘mocks’. An unfortunate term, redolent of school desks equally spaced in an airless school hall, cramming, the anxious but diligent students, the breezy confident bluffers. We’ve stopped all that. Pre-assessment is more than a change of language but of perspective too. We’re there to assess, but to help too, to make sure that what we send on to full assessment has our collective endorsement and input.
I’m one of the people often to be found sitting on the other side of the table, part of a panel of three or four, a mix of roles and experiences, there to ask the questions that form part of the eighteen points that make up the digital service standard, our service standard.
I’m frequently in awe of the teams that I meet across that table. Of a service manager with an encyclopaedic knowledge of her service. Of a product owner with a sure hand and an ability to confidently guide a team. Of my own designers ability to tell the tale of a design, the hypotheses, the pathways explored and rejected, the search for a better way yet to get the thing done. Of our researchers ability to bring their work, and the people they speak to, to life and to evidence their needs as users. It’s a privilege to be part of this as a panel and get the in-depth story of a service and its users.
Like any good interview, we’re willing service teams to be great. Looking for opportunities for them to tell the story of their service to the best of their abilities, always appreciative of the effort involved.
Not all of those services get there of course, first time at least. But, as a discipline, those five hours spent in a service assessment are invaluable. An intense, exhausting experience, critical to the rigour of our work as government digital teams. Something I can only wish I’d experienced years ago, long before government. And wouldn’t ever give up.
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