After a few months of work for the Design Council on Systemic Design Thinking in the Climate Crisis, I am back on a museum wayfinding project. We are about to test a prototype scheme and I need to think about what questions to ask. As with Systemic Design Thinking, there are issues of choosing the […]
Author: Alastair Somerville
Accessibility And…
I was invited to speak at Accessibility Scotland last week. Someone had to drop out and they needed a quick replacement. I was glad to help out. Update You can watch the original talk now on Vimeo. I needed to write a new talk quickly tho. I prefer to run workshops to explore problems but […]
Making and testing new forms of accessible information
Acuity Design is starting to test new ways of designing and making tactile maps and diagrams. Now we have a ZyChem swell printer it is much easier to run short tests and make prototypes. This test page is about 5 design elements. Title and Key The need for a title and key to describe what […]
Ritual design: bad and good
Why Design for Ritual? This is a post about the design of rituals. I will use a mostly negative framing to start with. This is because I live in the UK and there is new King’s Coronation next Saturday. It is an event lathered in ritual (most of which was invented in the 19th Century […]
Aeons, Agency and Autonomy in Design For Planet
The meaning of systemic worries me when talking about Systemic Design and I need to broaden it out in a few specific directions for Design Council Design For Planet workshops over the next two weeks. Systems as traps Design and designers can too often get trapped within systems and processes. The old Scientific Management ideas of […]
DespairShop
I set up a new web domain today. It is despairshop.com It is partially satirical and partially practical. I am working on a few projects where the ideas behind DespairShop are relevant. There are two key issues: only one of which is addressed by the current webpage. I will explain both in this post. Despair […]
Human centering systemic design?
I am working on the design of a few workshops for the Design Council in the UK. They are all around the theme of Design For Planet and more particularly the Systemic Design Framework and Toolkit. There are a lot of diagrams, tools and icons in all this. How to create a coherent workshop sequence […]
Design For Planet Systemic Design Toolkit workshops
I am working with the Design Council to develop facilitation materials based on their Systemic Design Framework, part of their mission to Design for Planet. The paper, which was published in 2021, outlines a systemic approach to design practice which they are now developing into tools aimed at designers. Workshop purpose What the workshops will […]
Simple emotion to create a space to listen
While running a walking workshop last week in Germany I was reminded that my user research questions are very basic. Given I do not speak German I was made more aware of this because of how much I generally needed to simplify my language for translation. I do not view scripted user research question sets […]
Resisting a fiction
In the United Kingdom, the rise of Thatcher is framed as a successful fightback against the victory of hard Left unions in taking over the country. That victory is defined in the Winter Of Discontent of 1978 (when many industries and services stopped due to strike action) just before Thatcher won the 1979 General Election. […]