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.
Everything is busy (again).
I’m surviving on something like 20-30% less sleep at the moment thanks to Zac’s arrival (conservative estimate/and I get to catch up with sleep a bit when traveling for work).
This is a quick update to cover the last couple of months. Continue reading…
All design is strategic unless you just see it as implementation.
Lingjing recently wrote about the importance of strategy.
I like this approach as a framework. It’s simply a way to think through and take forward a set of actions working towards a clear end-goal. Continue reading…
I don’t like talking about ‘redesign’.
The challenge is to design services all the time. Not to redesign them.
A redesign is a project mentality. Something with a start and end date. The opposite of this is making design part of how an organisation thinks and does things all the time. Continue reading…
May was all about the boy.
Zac was born on the 17th May – 9 days late but everything went smoothly this time around. Zac is our fourth child and joins his 3 older sisters in the expanding Holliday household. Continue reading…
Written by Ben Holliday. Based on work developed with Kirsty Sinclair and feedback from the FutureGov design team.
There’s a question of why designers make so many maps. We love maps. But there can be confusion or misunderstandings about why we’re making them or how they can be useful to service teams. Continue reading…
A busy month that included the Easter break and a family break to Somerset. In the meantime I’ve been mostly working in London, and we also wrapped up our FutureGov work in Glasgow.
I hit a sweet spot with writing this month.
I made a conscious effort to finish some things I had in draft, setting aside some dedicated time over a weekend. Continue reading…
The biggest factor in a point of crisis is the quality of information available or how informed an individual is.
Information is power. It can enable you to act independently and to get help. It’s also reassuring to feel in control and empowered when dealing with a difficult situation. Continue reading…
I often get asked about bias in design. My answer:
Continue reading…All design is flawed. But buried in each action, each small step that we take and every single decision — even when our best intentions are biased, mis-directed, or even driven by individual ego — is the ability to make magic happen.
I’ve worked for a number of years as a consultant, and have worked with many other consultants.
The consultants fallacy is to leave people thinking they need to work harder, or invest more time and money in order to understand your ideas and methods. Continue reading…
In my previous blog post I wrote about the differences between service design and business analysis. Continue reading…