PhD Research Updates

In an earlier post, I discussed Gedenryd's (1998) identification of a fundamental discrepancy in design methodology: the gap between "the received, theoretical views of how things ought to work, and...

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,...

Programme management operates through decomposition. A large initiative is broken into programmes; programmes are broken into projects; projects are broken into workstreams; workstreams are broken...

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 previous post, I explored how Fillmore's case grammar...

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. But that argument assumed a stable...

The "good services are verbs, bad services are nouns" heuristic - first articulated by Lou Downe at GDS in June 2015 - has become a powerful design principle across UK government and beyond. Yet this...

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 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...

In last week's post, I flagged that the word "event" is doing heavy lifting across the frameworks I have been drawing on. I claimed that Harel's statechart events and Iqbal's service grammar Events...

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 -...

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...

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...

The previous posts in this arc have surveyed different approaches to systematic design. Wilkinson's (2005) Grammar of Graphics demonstrated that a formal grammar - a vocabulary, a set of...

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 - objects, predicates, actions, goals - and...

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 the distinction between planning and design, and the formal apparatus that planning presupposes. In PDDL - the Planning Domain Definition Language used to specify...

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

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...

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,...

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

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...

In my earlier posts on conceptual spaces and concept modelling, I explored how people represent knowledge and how designers might make these representations visible. But there's a prior question I've...

In my previous posts, I examined conceptual modelling as design method and explored competing accounts of what concepts are across information systems, cognitive science, and social theory. In the...

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.