PhD Research Updates

The previous post in this series discussed the claims that the designer's most distinctive contributions to programme cultures are relational, embodied, and normative: the capacity to work with...

The previous post in this series examined the product management ontology of design value - the causal chain from strategy through objectives to measurable behaviour changes - and asked what it...

I was reflecting after the Experio Seminar last Friday, something that I have been thinking and writing about for a few years is perhaps worth formalising. Two distinct research traditions have...

The previous post explored why design process becomes what Jaimes Nel (2026) calls GPS. Nel's argument is that models like the Double Diamond, originally intended as orientational maps, hardened into...

The citizen development proposition - that domain experts can, with appropriate tooling, build and maintain the software their work requires without depending on specialist engineering teams - recurs...

The Design in Programme Management series examines how designers navigate the institutional dynamics of programme-led organisations: the epistemological tension, the cross-cutting value proposition,...

This post synthesises the literature on what happens when Design enters organisations governed through the programme management tradition - the stage-gate reviews, programme boards, benefits...

Gedenryd (1998) identified a fundamental discrepancy in design methodology: a gap between "the received, theoretical views of how things ought to work, and how they have turned out to work in reality...

Three years have passed since the concentrated sequence of posts that built this series' formal apparatus - conceptual spaces, state spaces, graphs, promises, statecharts, service grammar - and...

The preceding posts in this series have established a set of arguments: that many public sector programme management cultures are optimised for accountability and risk reduction, not hostile to...

The previous post argued that governance structures in public sector programmes are better understood as design material than as obstacles to be navigated. But there is a prior question that argument...

This is the fifth post in The Contested Prototype series. The first post described the practical situation; the second developed a prototyping typology grounded in Floyd (1984) and the Scandinavian...

This series has been circling around the concept of governance for some time without confronting it directly. The first post described the epistemological tension between design and programme...

The previous post argued that service design offers programme management cultures three things they cannot generate from their own logic: the cross-cutting view, the surfacing of invisible decisions,...

The previous post established the epistemological tension between design and programme management: both orientations are legitimate responses to real constraints, but the culture that results from...

The first post in this series described how strategic abstraction becomes delivery avoidance. The second examined the practical and epistemological problems of starting - how designers defer entry...

Performance dashboards in the public sector do not arrive without genealogy. As Leoni (2022) documents, the importance attached to data in public governance "might be the result of a longstanding...

Programme management in the public sector - and in the NHS in particular - is structured around accountability, milestone delivery, and risk reduction. These are not arbitrary cultural preferences;...

I have been making two arguments simultaneously, and I am increasingly aware that they pull in different directions. The first argument, developed across the formal apparatus posts and the statechart...

Two years ago, I wrote a post in this series arguing that service design's dominant tools - journey maps and service blueprints - are constrained graphs. They flatten relational structure, suppress...

The previous post traced connections between three uses of "frame" - Fillmore's linguistic frames, Goffman's situational frames, and Dorst's design frames - and concluded by noting that framing as a...

The word "frame" appears across multiple intellectual traditions, each using it to describe how structure shapes meaning and possibility. In the domain engineering vocabulary, frames are domain...

In the previous post, I argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable, is incomplete. Verbs alone cannot capture the material infrastructure, institutional rules, practice...

The previous post argued that the "good services are verbs" heuristic, while valuable as a corrective to bureaucratic naming, obscures as much as it reveals. The noun/verb distinction in service...

This series explores how linguistic structure shapes the way both human designers and computational agents understand and describe the abstract entities that services are. The connection to the...

The previous post concluded that the Motivational Design Framework lacked a unifying architecture - that the synthesis of SDT, discrepancy theory, ARCS, flow, and Dreyfus was ad hoc rather than...

The statechart work on a data access service a few months ago was clarifying in ways I did not expect. Applying Harel's formalism to a real service - mapping its states, transitions, preconditions -...

The first post laid out what the thesis was - its framework, its psychological sources, the moment it emerged from. The second examined what happened when the framework met reality: the case study...

This post was originally written in November 2024. It has since been revised to include cross-references to the companion Language, Frames, and Domain Understanding series - on case grammar,...

The posts in this series have traced a set of connections between the systems design literature - explored on a recent Linköping University PhD course, and the Tavistock tradition of systems...

The Scandinavian participatory design tradition has, over half a century, developed a compelling account of what design can contribute to democratic deliberation and social change. From the workplace...

The previous post laid out what the thesis was and what it drew on. This post examines two things: what happened when the framework met reality - the case study, its methods, and its blind spots -...

The aesthetic disruption literature in service design - developed most fully by Vink, Wetter-Edman and Blomkvist (2018) and Wetter-Edman, Vink and Blomkvist (2017) - makes a compelling case that...

Jones's seminar - as part of the ongoing Systems Engagements series at Linköping Univerity - on facilitating co-creation in context introduced a set of principles for convening participatory...

Vink's paper on bodily entanglements in social systems design makes a case that systems design has neglected the body - that it has operated primarily through cognitive and representational modes,...

A recent seminar - Berggren's - as part of the Systems Engagements series at Linköping University on systems simulation raised a question I have been circling around in my own practice without having...

Design practice is, at its core, representational work. Designers make sketches, journey maps, system maps, concept models, diagrams - visual and conceptual representations intended to change how...

Over the past year I have been reaching, in several posts and in the course of my industrial doctorate work, towards a set of ideas or perceptions about design and the design process that, it turns...

Working through the formal apparatus, the institutional critique, and the politics of formalism, it becomes apparent that the concept of "state" in "state space" has been operating across the series...

In 2011, I completed an MPhil thesis titled An Investigation into the Concept of Motivation within Design (Bisset, 2011). It argued that design practitioners and researchers needed to more clearly...

The previous posts in this series built a formal apparatus - conceptual spaces, state spaces, graphs, promises, statecharts, grammars - and then applied it to a critique of public sector...

Across this series I have developed an argument in three parts: that planning and design are fundamentally different activities, distinguished by whether the problem space within which work proceeds...

Throughout this series, I have developed a framework - state spaces, the planning/design distinction, grammars, constraints - and applied it to the conceptual infrastructure of service design. This...

The preceding posts in this series developed a theoretical apparatus - state spaces, grammars, the planning/design distinction - and sketched, in the grammar post, what a compositional approach to...

This post was originally written in October 2023. It has since been revised to add the "Decomposition Is Not Grammar" section, examining what the six originally proposed structural components achieve...

The previous post examined Brad Frost's Atomic Design - a hierarchical approach to composing user interfaces from atoms through to pages - and the post before that explored Wilkinson's Grammar of...

The previous post examined Wilkinson's Grammar of Graphics - a formal system for specifying statistical visualisations through composition of fundamental elements. Wilkinson showed that a creative...

The previous post contrasted product management and service design representations, finding that neither tradition has explicit state models, formal transition specifications, or generative grammars;...

The previous posts developed a conceptual apparatus - state spaces, planning, design, grammars - and established the distinction between constructing a domain and navigating within one. This post...

The previous post presented planning as a computational problem: navigation within a state space. The key insight was that planning presupposes a domain model - what the series calls domain...

The previous posts built up conceptual foundations: conceptual spaces, state spaces, promises, grammars, statecharts, service states, and boundary objects. Now we can address the question that...

The previous posts have established a framework: conceptual spaces as geometric vector spaces for representing meaning, state spaces as formal models of possible configurations, and various tools for...

The previous post introduced statecharts - David Harel's visual formalism for reactive systems, providing a rigorous notation for states, transitions, hierarchy, and concurrency. Statecharts...

The previous posts have built up a layered picture: state spaces as the foundation for reasoning about systems; conceptual spaces as geometric vector spaces for representing meaning; graphs as the...

The previous post introduced Promise Theory - Mark Burgess's framework for understanding cooperation between autonomous agents. Promises are voluntary commitments; services are networks of kept...

The previous posts - particularly Conceptual Spaces, What is a State Space?, and Graphs and Service Representations - have explored state spaces: what they are, how they are constructed, and how they...

The previous post explored state spaces geometrically - as coordinate systems with dimensions, where trajectories trace paths through abstract space. This post approaches state spaces from a...

The previous post showed how concepts can be represented geometrically - as regions in multi-dimensional vector spaces where similarity is distance. This geometric formalism is powerful: it provides...

The previous post surveyed competing frameworks for representing knowledge - distributed cognition, activity theory, social representations, prototype theory - and argued that Gärdenfors's conceptual...

The previous posts in this series established that services involve objects with properties, events that change those properties, and systems in which those events unfold. The next question is...

In a previous post I worked through von Busch and Palmås's (2023) Realdesign propositions against my experience at SCÖ, and the exercise left me with a question I could not answer within their...

The previous post established what kinds of objects public services engage with - patients, cases, assessments, entitlements, relationships - and the different ways those objects can be defined, from...

The previous post introduced domain engineering - the design work of constructing the representational infrastructure that computational systems presuppose - and identified it as the series' central...

Three things converged during my time at SCÖ, a Swedish coordination association for vocational rehabilitation, that set the direction for this series. Each pointed toward the same underlying...

This post draws on a paper Ana Kustrak and I presented at the NORDES 2023 conference, exploring the metaphors through which the role of "service designer" is understood in Swedish public sector...

I first read The Corruption of Co-Design (Von Busch and Palmås, 2023) when it came out late last year, around the same time I was writing about organisational metaphors and performance and substance....

I have submitted a paper to the NORDES 2023 Doctoral Consortium exploring something that has been building throughout this series: the psychodynamic processes that emerge when designers attempt to...

My employment at the coordination association ends this month. The ESF funding wasn't renewed. Up to eleven of us are being made redundant. The PhD continues, technically, but without the industrial...

Design theory rests on an assumption so foundational it's rarely examined: that making things visible enables change. Prototypes surface problems or prove viability, or provide something tangible...

The two preceding posts in this series have established a framework for thinking about aesthetics in service design: Folkmann's (2013) three platforms - sensual-phenomenal, conceptual-hermeneutical,...

The previous post argued that service design faces an aesthetic deficit: a lack of vocabulary and theoretical apparatus for discussing how services structure experience across sensual, conceptual,...

Before I became a service designer, I spent several years working as a ski instructor in Norway. The transition from teaching people to ski to designing public services might appear to be a...

In earlier posts, I described what federated learning is, what it would require, what happened when I tried to reverse-engineer the Pathway Generator, and what the discipline of typing its data...

In the previous post I described three kinds of artefact from the algorithm archaeology: concept maps that synthesised and performed a gap analysis of the Pathway Generator's structure against...

In previous posts, I've described what federated learning is and what it would actually require. This post is about what happened when I tried to understand the algorithm that the project was...

The LiU Design department has been running a seminar series on mission-oriented innovation. I've been attending, trying to connect what I'm learning about federated learning to broader discussions...

Throughout this series, I've been exploring design's relationship to intangible materials - from Krippendorff's trajectory toward discourses, through metaphors and counterfactual thinking, to the...

In my previous posts in this series, I've been exploring design's relationship to intangible materials - Krippendorff's trajectory from products to discourses, the metaphors that shape how we imagine...

I've just returned from a period of leave, and I'm trying to make sense of where I am. Six months into the industrial doctorate at SCÖ, and something feels off - not in a way I can easily articulate,...

This post was originally written in October 2022. It has since been revised to include cross-references to the later state space and planning vs design posts, where the distinction between navigating...

In my earlier post, I described what federated learning is. Now, a few months into the work, I want to think through what FL would actually require in practice - and why I'm increasingly concerned...

In my previous post on metaphor, I explored how metaphors aren't just decorative language but constitutive of thought itself. Lakoff and Johnson showed that we think through metaphors; Schön...

This post was originally written in August 2022. It has since been revised to include a cross-reference to the later conceptual spaces post, where Gärdenfors's geometric framework was explored in...

This post was originally written in August 2022. It has since been revised to include a cross-reference to the later technomagic analysis, where the theatrical function of design artefacts was...

In my previous post on conceptual modelling as design method, I articulated an approach to making visible the conceptual structures that underpin complex sociotechnical systems. What I did not...

Klaus Krippendorff has been a foundational influence on my understanding of design since my MPhil. His work sits at the intersection of design, cybernetics, and communication theory - a combination...

Three months into this industrial doctorate, I find myself in an unusual position. I was hired as a designer - someone with a background in service design, interaction design, and design research -...

In my recent post on concept modelling of work rehabilitation, I presented a series of hierarchical and graph-based visualisations synthesising different theoretical models from the vocational...

As I begin the concept modelling work for the ADAPT project - attempting to map what "data science" means to different stakeholders, and to synthesise models of vocational rehabilitation from the...

I've spent the past week reviewing the literature on vocational rehabilitation models - ICF frameworks, biopsychosocial approaches, Swedish return-to-work research. Yesterday I documented that...

Another facet of my recent work has been a review of literature, and derived from this, the synthesis of a number of approaches to the conceptual and contextual modelling of work rehabilitation.

I've recently started a research position exploring machine learning and design for Swedish vocational rehabilitation services - specifically, the possibility of using federated learning to support...

Over the last month or so I have been doing a bit of data archaeology on the Pathway Generator Patient Vector and Pathway Generator Service Vector.