Ben Holliday is an experienced design leader, writer and speaker. This is his blog (started in 2005). If you’re new to this site, Ben has published a playbook for design linking together many of his blog posts from the past 5 years. You can book him to speak at an event, get in touch or follow him on Twitter.
It’s been a busy year so far and my intention of writing regular monthly updates hasn’t materialised (my last proper update was back in February). I’ve been prioritising other things, mostly real life and family.
I am still finding some time to write, especially as part of my role as Chief Design Officer at FutureGov, so I thought it would be useful to collect together everything that I’ve written this year. Continue reading…
I’m encouraged by the number of people talking about how they are taking on more responsibility to lead design. Emma’s blog post was great about her decision to take on a new role, and Ale’s call out to bring together more people in lead design roles has had a great response. Continue reading…
More and more I feel like I’m stepping outside recognised design communities to have conversations about design.
I think that this is important. For me, the practice of design is secondary to being able to translate design into something more impactful. Continue reading…
Just over a year ago, I wrote about comparing service design to business analysis. This was to highlight differences in skill sets, with an emphasis on how service design can bring a new set of approaches and focus to organisations.
In areas of government, and often in large or more enterprise IT-led organisations, service design is still seen at best as interchangeable with established business design functions. Continue reading…
Seniority in design is about personal responsibility.
A disclaimer to start with. While everyone can take personal responsibility, not everyone has the same circumstances, privilege or types of choices to make when doing so.
But, whatever your situation, everyone can can take personal responsibility for their work as a designer. Continue reading…
“Complexity in the work. Simplicity in how we approach the work.”
Following on from my previous blog post, I’m a big advocate of designing simple models, or frameworks (including working from first principles).
When we’re working to solve problems, it’s the simplicity and clarity of frameworks that can help us to work with subject matters that are inherently complex. Continue reading…
The importance of frameworks is that you focus on a smaller set of things because you can’t focus on everything.
I spend a lot of my time designing, or constructing frameworks as a way of helping others access a way of working that’s anchored to a design process. Continue reading…
Design leadership requires different types of empathy.
We often talk about about the importance of having empathy with end users. These are the people we’re designing for, and the immediate goal for teams working in this way is to understand how people are feeling, as well as what they might be thinking or doing in a given situation. Continue reading…
Back in 2015 I wrote ‘Everything is hypothesis-driven design’. It remains one of my most (and still frequently) read blog posts.
Something I’ve been thinking about more recently is how this translates to user research and ‘discovery’.
A discovery should be focussed on research and learning. Continue reading…
In a design process there are two immediate things that matter*: Continue reading…