Weeknote 9: on drawing dragons

Design is one of the most authoritarian and annoying practices that modernity has created.
– Antonio Caronia in ‘What Design Can’t Do’ by Silvio Lorusso

Had a big week at work last week. It was overwhelming to see how much press our work on HPV self-testing at home got. My comms colleagues are geniuses really.

While that was happening, I was busy mulling over the fact that I don’t think we do service design in the way that Lou and others think of service design. I’m five months into my role now and I have seen a fair few service maps and blueprints but they don’t exactly hit the nail on the head for me personally. They don’t address the fact that participants will feel what they feel about our service on the basis of the compounded experiences they’ll have had of the NHS at large. How do you map the impact of a relationship you were not involved in?

Our sphere of influence as a digital screening team is in direct relationship to other parts of the NHS and how participants have interacted with those. There’s a halo effect everywhere you turn. This is really the kind of mapping problem that can only exist when you’re in the 7th largest employer in the world.

And then there’s just modern digital life. We might be sending potential participants an email in a very full inbox, another notification in a phone they’re trying to spend less time on, an SMS they think might be spam, a phone call coming from a GP practice they have difficulty engaging with for reasons we don’t know.

What do you do then? Do you keep mapping all these possible scenarios and dependencies? I think you could but then (again from What Design Can’t Do) “as every problem is chased by another problem […] every attempt to bring order to the world produces a certain amount of disorder”.

So there’s a point where you just have to pick some things to figure out, some discreet touch points to improve, while living with the uncertainty and the discomfort that you won’t be able to work on the whole in the way you’d like. I don’t think that’s a failure, it just requires a little less arrogance. Better to recognise that there are dragons than to imagine you can avoid them by drawing a better map.