A whole load of interconnectedness going on in what I’ve been working on and reading in my feed this morning.

The new Government must draw on the power of institutional memory by David Mann

The word ‘learn’ appears 9 times in this piece, emphasising for me how ‘institutional memory’ is all about educating the future institution (or, organisation, company, agency, consultancy).

This might seem like an obvious connection, but it’s often completely lost by shortsighted teams, focused on their isolated project. We need to install the idea that one of their outcomes, beyond the ones in their brief or statement of work, should be to clearly document their learnings and make them accessible as future educational tools.

Such lessons could be as simple as good old fashioned blog posts, as David’s piece points out (so long as they’re written as lessons and not fluff pieces with no clear points or relatable takeaways).

In my opinion though, we should be redesigning and redefining case studies to be more like documentaries, or postmortems. And these should be written up, podcasted and turned into videos (in a ‘trinity of content delivery’ – which is a theory I’ll save for another time). ‘Clear documentation is the unit of institutional memory’, perhaps.

More open and demonstrative records like this would be awesome educational tools, and the perfect fodder for making…

The case for a Digital Design Council, by Alex DS

It’s great to read Alex’s thoughts on this, being someone that’s worked in the Design Council, and some of the ideas and connections she makes in her piece align with the recently released…

Systemic Design Framework, from the Design Council

In part of course because it’s something that Alex was directly involved in.

I’m particularly interested in this project by the Designing for Legacy portion (which feels essentially like what I’m getting at at the top of this post).

… to help you end a project or a piece of work well; for the benefit of yourself, your team and the wider system, so that your hard work and impact to date can be built upon instead of forgotten. 

Thanks to Nat for sharing about this.

Before the legacy though, it’s the systematic naming nature of this work that I’m also excited about and wanting to dig more into, as for me design thinking (and doing) is inextricably linked to systems thinking. Practically synonymous. The Systemic Design System says…

Systemic design is the acknowledgement of complexity and interconnectedness throughout the design thinking and doing process.

This is the only way to design, imo. And it’s a perspective that I’m continuing to work in to the course I’m writing…

UI Design for Berghs

UI design is a critical and yet single part of the broader user-centred design process. Investigate why, where and how it fits in…

That’s a line from week 1, but it runs throughout. Very much looking forward to the chance to teach in this interconnected way and not just focus on buttons and Figma tricks — Not that they don’t have their place because they absolutely do. But again, as a critical yet single parts of the design process.

Learning, educating, sharing, documenting, systematising, connecting, standardising and reviewing. Back to the top and amend and add with open consensus.

Sounds quite agile/iterative, and it is, but not just on a project by project level. We need this across the ENTIRE design landscape. From education to graduation, practice to project, case studies to institutional memory.