Plate - 5 to 9 October

Published: 13 October 2026
Tagged: weeknote

Super late note, as the school lurgy takes over the house, and thinking slows to duvet speed.

That week

We took some time as a team to reflect on the last quarter when we rebuilt the site - recognising what was tough, appreciating what was good, especially our communication culture, and thinking about what we’d change next time.

As a team we’ve started to sketch out what we currently know and don’t know about our problem area for the upcoming discovery. We quickly learnt we need to align on terms that get bandied about during this kind of work, and this diagram from an NHS digital team has been very helpful. We’ve also been talking with leadership to refine the vision and goals, so that the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of the future service offer can be properly worked out before the ‘how’.

We had a good discussion at my community drop-in for the content designers in our wider group, mainly on improving working relationships in our teams. Some people are in tricky situations (though common ones for designers), but hopefully the group’s advice and support will help them find a way through. Next time I might remember to wave my copy of Why Design is Hard at the camera.

Towards the end of the week I made progress on (re-)designing parts of our supporting content, now that we can use our new content management system (CMS) for the live framework site. This included the classic challenge of ‘re-formatting tables so that they work on smaller screens, or maybe just don’t use a table at all?’.

It’s the kind of detailed, granular content design work that reminds you why you got in to this business in the first place. Thank you for the valuable feedback from other content designers, much appreciated.

A notebook page showing notes for a game with the working title 'Allotment'. There are notes on potential actions, rounds and cards, and then below two biro sketches of potential cards for plants.
Last thing Friday my researcher colleague and I did more scheming for the game we’ve volunteered to design for our next team away day in November. It’s tentatively titled The Allotment at the End of the World, and it’s great to have something purely creative like this on our plates. But I can feel that plate getting fuller just as it got lighter…