Earlier this year I set out to understand more about the history of the National Health Service. As well as reading some books recommended by colleagues, I've picked up a few original 1948 documents from online auctions. Some archaic language aside, they're as fresh and relevant today as they were 70 years ago. Exhibit 1: … Continue reading 5 July 1948: A chance and a challenge
Service design in the public sector is, as Lou says, 10% innovation and 90% archaeology, and never more so than when working in a great national institution in its 70th year. Realising I needed to learn more about the history of our National Health Service, I asked the Twitter crowd where to start. Here's what … Continue reading Anyone can use it: some NHS history links and reading
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjwYdvwC8CE "Evolution. What's it like? So one day you're a single-celled amoeba and then, whoosh! A fish, a frog, a lizard, a monkey, and, before you know it, an actress. [On-screen caption: "Service limitations apply. See three.co.uk"] I mean, look at phones. One, you had your wires. Two, mobile phones. And three, Three video mobile. Now … Continue reading “Evolution. What’s it like?” The three lives of the front-facing camera
This summer, after a lovely 2 week holiday in Tuscany, I returned to Leeds and straight into a classroom full of government senior leaders discussing agile and user-centred design. Their challenges set me thinking once more about the relationship between technology and social relations in the world of work. One well-known story from the Italy … Continue reading And yet it moves! Digital and self-organising teams with a little help from Galileo
On the evening of Sunday 28 December 1879, a newly built bridge over the River Tay collapsed as a train passed over it in a storm. All 70 passengers perished. William Topaz McGonagall commemorated the disaster in possibly the most comical poem ever earnestly composed. And ironwork recovered from the river estuary was sent for … Continue reading Facts Not Opinions – a talk at Bettakultcha’s ‘Importance of Failure’
Way back in June, as part of Andrew Wilson's wonderful HannaH Festival, a group of citizens fanned out from Wharf Street Chambers into the summer drizzle clutching maps to four quarters of our city. We briefed participants to look for evidence of Leeds' past, present and future. On returning to base we shared what everyone had found … Continue reading A found Leeds litany, raw notes from an afternoon walk
These past few years have been tough on Tetley's disembodied headquarters. First came the loss of the purpose for which it was built in the depths of 1930s depression - a human-scale head office for a family firm. The directors' boardroom was relegated to an outpost of the Carlsberg empire. Lutheran rectitude became the order … Continue reading The definite article, or lines written on the opening of a former brewery headquarters as contemporary art gallery
As a child I hated Cubs. All that running around and shouting, the church parades, and camping on a damp field at the edge of Danbury Common. But in a twist of fate I find myself parent to three boys far more enthusiastic than I ever was; my oldest recently got a badge marking seven … Continue reading Keep the campfire burning: a thread of whimsy from Baden-Powell to Berners-Lee
If you live in, work in, or occasionally visit a city, any city, but especially one in England's North, please set aside half an hour or so some time soon to watch and read two powerful critiques of the prevailing techno-determinist vision of the so-called "smart city". All 11,000 words of Dan Hill's post on … Continue reading Make mine a messy city: Riot Sim and the City that Didn’t Riot
For the past four years a story has accreted on this blog. It's a meta-narrative, a story about stories. Looking back, I believe the arc began with the partial collapse of Leeds' Temple Works. That's what led me to encounter the people who made this city, and then to talk about them in pixels, in … Continue reading How’s it going to end?
Notes from my presentation at Bettakultcha, Leeds Town Hall, on Wednesday 9 January 2013. What an amazing venue. I could spend the next five minutes just talking about this building. I could tell you how the Leeds Corporation raised a special tax and set a budget of £35,000 to build a grand new town hall. … Continue reading Five minutes, one year, two buildings, a thousand stories
For my wife's family it is the crockery. Staffordshire-raised, they can't resist upturning plates and bowls to check their makers' marks - Doulton, Wedgwood and what-have-you. And my own father grew up near Sheffield, so in restaurants I also study the knives and forks - David Mellor was a Noughties Brit cuisine staple. But Leeds, well … Continue reading Three machines made in Leeds
This is the text of my presentation at the Leeds Digital Conference on 12 October 2012. If you like this, you may also like my TEDxLeeds 2010 talk, The Makers of Leeds. In 1763, the Corporation of London, wishing to make way for bigger boats on the Thames, ordered the removal of a central pier … Continue reading The future beneath our feet
On opening the great arch at London Bridge, by throwing two arches into one, and the removal of a large pier, the excavation, around and underneath the sterlings of that pier, was so considerable, as to put the adjoining piers, that arch, and eventually the whole bridge, in great danger of falling. The previous opinions … Continue reading Mr. SMEATON IN UR RIVR FIXIN UR BR1DGE
The fantastic culmination of James Burke's talk at dConstruct last week set me thinking about a misleading trope that seems to recur with regularity in our discourse about technology. Through his 70s TV series James was a childhood hero of mine. I wrote about his talk in my summary of the event, and thanks to … Continue reading A {$arbitrary_disruptive_technology} In Every Home
