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👋 Welcome to the debut issue of design thoughts. You’re here and you signed up!

I’m Charlotte, I curate this newsletter. I’m a (newly) freelance service designer. My career started at Snook service design agency in 2014, since then I’ve designed services across the government, third sector, private sector and created my own start up.

I’m always looking to improve my practice, I think as design thinkers we can do that in a number of ways;

• Reading and learning from what others are doing.
• Finding opportunities to grow our practice like; interesting jobs, speaking gigs, mentoring opportunities.

In this newsletter I’ll be making it easier to access reading by providing short round-ups of news, and a list of upcoming opportunities I’ve spotted.

🤯 Meetings *are* the work

Elizabeth Ayer

I stumbled across this article and it blew my tiny mind. For those of us who are overwhelmed by meetings in a large organisation, I’ve summarised this article by Elizabeth Ayer. This is just the TL:DR version, you can read the full article here.

• Although meetings can feel like dead time, the only work that matters in a knowledge economy (a term coined by Peter Drucker in Landmarks of Tomorrow in 1966) happens when we are learning together.
• When working in tech it can feel like we keep repeating large-scale mistakes, and not learning as an organisation from these mistakes.
• Individual learning is necessary for group/organisational learning. But it’s significantly more complex for groups of people to develop whole new theories and behaviours to better carry out the organisation's purpose.

The good news is, we can improve our collective learning in a number of ways:

• Get diverse input from colleagues, spend time interpreting and understanding other people’s points of view and actively find errors in our own thinking.
• Take time to do things like reading, listening and sharing knowledge, understanding that these tasks are just as important as producing artefacts
• Resist the urge to fill in the hunger for meaning with lists and tasks. “Conversations with these as a primary focus are the empty calories of a working life.”

✅ 7 steps to bring design into a new organisation

Nicole Michaelis

I stumbled across this Twitter thread from Nicole on how to establish a content design practice in your organisation. These learnings are also relevant to people who are establishing themselves as a user research, service designer or content designer in an organisation that doesn’t already have that capability.

1. Get leadership teams on board; from product, marketing and beyond, explain what content design is and how it may affect their work.
2. Run sessions on the benefit of content design. Spend 6-12 months on this education mindset.
3. Set up a way to collect new requests for content design from your wider team.
4. Communicate issues early: technical blockers, not being brought in early enough, last minute changes in copy. Speak up early and explain patiently.
5. Document, document, document. Make a habit of documenting what you’re working on and keep track of how your contributions are having an impact.
6. Align your work with the org’s strategic initiatives.
7. Build strong connections - don’t fall into the busy trap. Make an effort to make time to get to know folks and form connections that enrich your everyday work.

🗞 Hot design news

• 🌎 The US State Department Ditches Times New Roman for Calibri. Source. Over in the UK we’ve been sans-serif with our own GDS Transport for a long time.
• 📲 How the UK emergency alert system test has been years in the making. Source​
• 🛑 Italian privacy regulator banned ChatGPT for privacy violations: "the mass collection and storage of personal data” Source​
• ✨ Nancy Kelley from Stonewall gave insights on how to be a better trans ally: call out transphobia in your community, even if it’s uncomfortable. Support trans organisations with cash, time and your voice. Source​

📣 Opportunities

Speak at Magnify Conference

• Remote inclusive design and research conference, 6 November
• Deadline for ideas is 28th June 2023
• ​Apply to speak here​

Speak at Push Conference

• A UX conference in Munich, 19-20 October
• They review applications on a rolling basis, so there’s no deadline but a good idea to get your application in!
• ​Apply to speak here​

👓 Tweet of the week goes to... Specsavers

Tweet of the week goes to Specsavers. Twitter brough out a new ‘Alt-text’ label which would be visible on all Twitter images. Lots of people and brands responded by hiding joke messages in their images alt text, writing ‘Click here’ on the image.

This is a problem because as Specsavers said: “ALT text is a hugely important accessibility tool designed to help people navigate the internet more easily, so it shouldn't be used as a punchline. This is especially true if the ALT text doesn't describe the image, leaving blind and visually impaired people out of the joke.”
Specsavers didn’t make a joke at the expense of screen-reader users, they used their alt-text to explain how to use Alt-text properly. Source.