Tuesday, 28 April 2009
Live Well with Mayo
Monday, 27 April 2009
Black Cod
185ml mirin
125ml oz sake
225g white miso paste (available in some Asian grocers and supermarkets)
225g sugar
pickled ginger
Soak those bad boys overnight and you have a dark sweet fish that needs a few minutes under a hot grill, followed by 5 mins in a hot over. I had to substitute vermouth for sake, as the missus baulked at the price of the sake in Sainsburys! But she liked it so much, I think it'll be in the cupboard next week. Either that, or I'll do the shopping this weekend. Whatever - it still tasted great. Worth prepping on a Sunday for a Monday bonus.
Friday, 24 April 2009
How to embed design thinking in your team
Want to get a handle on Service Design?
- Great reference to Virgin's terminal experience (which Engine can be proud of). And the plane - if you want people to sleep on planes, don't give them a sofabed, give them a chair - and a bed!
- And Churchill's vision for Design Council - "Britain can make it!" But what companies need from designers is changing - it's not the physical artefact, and not just an aesthetic. Systems, services and business models are now being designed and protoyped.
- Street Car was a business model design idea from RCA graduates.
- Buster drain cleaner: owner jumped on the designed demand programme. It hit "the soul of the company".
- HMV Westfield store designed with online business in mind - the explosive website hits home - the shop is colour coded based on the online store. Not music, videos and games - instead listen, watch and play.
- Air conditioner manufacturer who designed components which brought massive cost effeiciencies - within the product itself and also stock control
"Design thinking is an important idea who's design has come." Great summary of all that's exciting about service design right now.
Wednesday, 22 April 2009
Write up of the Open Gov event
Anyway - these are just notes, so I'm going to chuck down cool things I saw as bullets. Not going to analyse the whole lot. Definitely not a complete list in, so apologies to any I missed. They reflect the key theme I liked from the day - simple to put up, effective, easy to use and meeting a clear and practical need:
- Poly Wonk - Mitchell Sava, co-chair of the event, alongside Simon Grice. Sensible chap with sensible ideas. Trying to get govt to think the right way about this stuff. Believes we're on the threshold of biggest democratic transformation in last 150 years.
- Debategraph - cool way to visualise debates. Mind you, doubtless not as much fun as having them in the pub.
- Cabinet Office's netvibes page
- Becta's Ning community - a beloved client of my employer the Team
- The most excellent communal authoring site Mixed Ink - bear witness to the People's Inauguration Address written by 455 fellow americans.
- Tweetminster - although if you find yourself spending too long on this site, you may need to get a life
- An apparent "must read" paper by Pew Internet Society on the Internet's Role in [US] Campaign 2008
- Apparently the south bank centre ran a treasure hunt using text messages, and used the data to help plan traffic flows around the building. Though I can't find nowt about it.
- A bad way to do online democracy - Whitehouse 2 - too black and white. Too yes and no. Apparently.
- Delib - tools for online democracy etc
- Booking Bug - a smart booking system for people like wedding photographers, trying to make in-roads to government. Best of luck. Meanwhile I've told my brother - damianbailey.com
- Digital Engagement Manifesto
- Letting people talk about where they live on... WhereILive.org
- A London City Charter - setting ideals by which the city will run itself for citizens. Marvelous.
- The soon to come out of the oven Be Local - good luck to Simon Grice on that venture
- Doing cool stuff with transport data - itoworld.com - these guys crammed loads of cool looking sites into a 2 minute slot! I didn't write them down. FAIL.
- DIUS' sandpit - aka Sandbox - where they're doing some cool low cost, high(er) risk things on the fringes of the DIUS servers.
- And DIUS digitalgovuk project running on delicious. Helps you find case studies for projects going on in government using a variety of social media. Gold mine stuff. And you can tag stuff too
- And DIUS' own netvibes page of course
- The lady Obama stole from google to run his online campaign, Katie Jane Stanton, who is coming to town this summer for a Q&A session. Should be fun.
- Take photos of rubbish, it gets cleaned up I lovelewisham.org (but I still moved to Surrey!) Apparently they're getting bored old people to take photos of pot holes!
- GovTalk - the home of government API on the net?
- Job Centre Pro Plus - cutting through the crap to do postcode search on Job Centre Plus. Amazingly, this probably would have taken a month long, expensive change request via formal routes. Though site wasn't working last time I checked
Monday, 20 April 2009
National Tip Good Service Day
Bell boys, taxis, barbers - a handful of others use them in a
pretty under-stated way here in the UK. I can think of many services
that'd be greatly enhanced by a tip. Department store sales reps,
guards on trains, nurses, dry cleaners, librarians. People that
provide me with a memorably good service experience should be
recognised regardless of their industry.
Which got me thinking. Perhaps we need an annual "Tip Good Service
Day"? It'll give rightful recognition to the fact that so many of us
work in service businesses. It'll give those who strive to give good
service an opportunity for recognition and reward. It'll give the
people who receive good service an opportunity to say thanks to those
that go the extra mile.
Like the occasional guard on my train who wishes everyone a good
weekend and checks ahead for service disruptions. Like the staff in my
local sandwich shop who remember what I want and ask how my day's
going. Like the mechanic that washes the car at no extra cost. Like
the binmen who can't get their truck down my street, so who wheel each bin all the way up and back, whistling as they go.
Everyone loves good service, but here in the UK, we often let it go in-
recognized - perhaps putting a £5 note in a Christmas card and leaving
it for the postman. But it all seems a bit patchy and unfair to me.
Let's join it all up and celebrate it once a year.
Crowdsourcing road building
Friday, 17 April 2009
Pay to call your doc?
I could call NHS Direct, but you have to go through all those questions every time. The great thing about your GP is the continuity of care. They know your history, so can get straight to the point. So let me pick up the phone at an agreed time in the day, or perhaps leave a voicemail for a ring back. But let me use the phone. If at the end the GP says "you better come in" then that's great. I'll make an appointment. But let me have the service option. It would be good.
They're doing it in America, but then - they're also charging people for the privilege. Not something we can do here with the NHS. Although I bet BUPA are working on something right now...
Thursday, 16 April 2009
Supersite security?
This was preceded by Michael Cross last week in the Guardian - speculating at the Tory options for Transformational Government.
I think all of this stuff is a bit short sighted actually. To summarise - the supersites are being attacked because they are somehow failing. That businesslink.gov.uk, NHS Choices and Directgov have significant budgets, but they aren't transforming things fast enough AND other government agencies and departments are still creating their own new websites. So not enough transforation and not fast enough.
Well, surprise surprise - telling civil servants they can't register new .gov.uk domains only means they register .net and .org domains. They are smart like that.
I'd suggest the answer is not closing the supersites, but instead enforcing the rule of "no new sites". If civil servants all had to put stuff on the supersites, and advertise that it was there (something Directgov is beginning to crack) you'd start to see them getting increased usage. Ideally that would convert into extra funding to invest in ongoing improvements to those sites. So the more people they get, the more funding they can invest in making the experience beneficial.
And a degree of patience please (*!political naivety alert!*). Capita are only recently in place at NHS Choices, Serco are diligently bashing through convergence at businesslink.gov.uk and Directgov appear to be getting traction with recent campaigns. Varney's three year challenge was very aggressive. Progress is happening. To snipe now will only play into the hands of the "keep your heads down and it'll all go away" hardliners that live off administration changes.
Great Government 2.0 resource
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
The post consumer era
So I'm reading these articles and mulling it over. The first thing to go appears to be the bling. People can't stretch to it and it was always a bit silly. A fraction of the population is probably feeling severed from it, but they were setting themselves up for a fall anyway. The irony of bling was that it became a watchword for cheap, debt-driven consumerism - and not wealth.
And in its place, supposedly, rises thrift. In a sense a form of production, as rather than consume we fix - make do and mend. But the thrift is pretty much a lost craft. Note Mrs Sew and Sew's blog by the Imperial War Museum. People can save money by stopping buying things and by down-grading or down-branding to value brands and Primarks, but they're still consuming. David Armano's retail sales graph is more alarmist than it appears. Sales haven't dropped off the cliff. Retail has been growing year on year, but now it's shrunk a bit. Calamity! No year on year growth! What I like about Umair's talk is his questioning not just of the producer/consumer paradigm, but ten others that mark out the destructive nature of the gross capitalism we've had of late.
The common theme for both items is that we're retreating to an apparently more human view of life - permanent year on year growth suddenly appears illogical and unnatural, fixing something feels sensible, yearning for wealth through debt is so obviously harmful. I like that trend. Even if it is emerging in the shadow of economic insecurity, it's still a positive thing.
Monday, 6 April 2009
Twitter backlash
Service design laggard
I've taken my eyes off the service design agenda for a few weeks. Firstly for a well deserved holiday, which was wonderful, secondly because I needed to focus on the other side of my brain with a bit of pure creativity (see last post), and finally because I had some Big Things To Do at work - not al SD related. That all seems to have played out nicely and I'm now re-engaging the SD gear and starting to leave the garage again on a steady pedal. What better way than with a new book - New Service Development and Innovation in the New Economy. Which is under pressure as it has to compete with the rather excellent Child 44.