Mike Gallagher

Out of all of the government design principles, “make things open: it makes things better” is probably tied for memorability with “do the hard work to make it simple”. It sounds bright and modern, almost the opposite of how most people perceive government behaviour. Today, an appeal to make things open is so common that it sometimes feels like a stock phrase that people tack on just because it is the done thing. Underneath this snappy motto, however, is an entire worldview. This is worth unpacking.

The materialist justification for this principle is straightforward: everything we work on is paid for by the public purse, making it public property. This is true regardless of whether you are permanent staff, a contractor, or a consultant. It is one of the defining characteristics of public sector work and represents a fundamental distinction to working for enterprise. To deliver on this, we need to ensure that the things we learn and make are easily accessible to all so that they don’t need to be re-learned or re-made, unnecessarily draining limited funding. Making our work open to everyone is a civic responsibility and a contractual obligation.

For those new to the public sector, this situation might be uncomfortable because it runs counter to the late-capitalist ideology of competition and resource extraction. If you were raised in an environment where success was associated with exploiting a niche or disrupting a market (shudder), it will be bizarre to consider the possibility that giving away your most precious ideas might be desirable. This has a particularly bizzaro-world quality in technology spaces, where instead of the copyright-happy ethos of Silicon Valley, we find a community intent on making sure their work is reused freely. Rather than angling for a payout, perhaps we can encourage people to steal our work?

The alignment between this principle and the open-source software movement should be clear. Less obvious might be its deeper historical roots. Typically, when we speak of “internet-era ways of working”, we are referring to the expectations of end-users that have been set up by a world of smartphones and apps. There is another side of these ways of working though: the perspective of the makers. The early internet promised a world of connection fostered by the free flow of ideas. People were meant to be able to find fellow travellers by sharing their interests online. This was supposed to result in new communities. For a while, it did.

Corporatised social media soured the promise of early internet spaces, but since early on in the UK public sector’s adoption of contemporary methods of digital delivery, organisations have taken up blogging as a means of sharing what they’re learning and building community. Individuals working within departments have also been very active online. This was such a significant element of early GDS that there is even a sticker that reads “I survived the week all the famous bloggers quit”, commemorating when most of the founding team departed. Blogging was core to the identity of this new, internet-oriented way of working. It represented a new way for government departments to exist in the world, one grounded in transparency and directness.

The phrase “the digital commons” isn’t in vogue anymore, but the notion of collective, community assets is a major artery running through the body politic of public sector design and technology. Publishing endeavours like design histories and design system backlogs extend the knowledge pool of individual blogs to incorporate and expose institutional memory. To that end, the NHS App team has recently added three posts about our work exploring native technology:

• Exploring a spectrum of possibilities
• Native form flows
• Utilising the web app

There will be more posts in this series, and hopefully more posts about all of the rest of the work happening on the App. We’ve also recently made our native hypothesis backlog public. We’ll document what we’re investigating and what we’re learning there as we go. It might not be valuable to other teams right now, and that’s fine. Much like design system backlogs, the things the team is learning are now searchable on the open web, making them a durable public asset.

Making this backlog public was something we had to argue for. Our organisation can be risk-averse, and for good reason. It helps that there is no working code in the repo. The worst thing that can happen is that we’ll look like idiots by exposing how little we know. Showing or describing what you’re working on in a public place, be that an open Slack channel or the whole dang internet, adds an element of risk to whatever it is that you’re doing. Maybe no one will be interested or you’ll find out you’ve done something wrong. Conversely, maybe others can learn from what you’ve done. To work in the open, one needs to bracket anxiety about not being good enough. That isn’t easy, but the potential payoff is significant. The chances of getting useful feedback go up. The possibilities for building a community around the work expand. The likelihood of finding fellow travellers is increased.

This very blog is an attempt to foster exactly those conditions. I’m not doing this to be a “thought leader” (yuck), but rather because I’ve had enough conversations about the topics I tend to write about here that I began to wonder if it would be worth taking the time to write it all down so people outside my immediate orbit can engage too. Over the course of the last year, I think the core wager has paid off. At times, it is a terrifying endeavour. I’m not an extrovert and I don’t need to publish what I write to personally benefit from the writing process – I can do that all by myself, regardless of whether anyone else reads it. I’m doing this not only because it might foster connections beyond the people I already come into contact with, but also because it can serve as a catalyst for discussion with people I work with every day.

If you’ve only ever known Twitter or YouTube comments as models for direct digital engagement, it might be surprising to find out how supportive most people in this domain are when you start putting yourself out there. I’m not a significant contributor to cross-gov Slack, but I appreciate its existence. The amount of time members put into helping one another, entirely of their own volition and in addition to their actual jobs, is a marvel. The result of that community labour is a design and technology hivemind, built on knowledge gained from years of doing the doing. The phrase “make things open: it makes things better” gets tossed around a lot and sounds simple, but I think it encapsulates a profound set of ideas that define what is specific to working in the public sector. We need to continue to sing this song so that future generations know what we mean and why we mean it.

This week, I do not have the strength to elaborate on the various things that have gone at work because my headspace has been completely overwhelmed by the murder of an ICU nurse by border patrol officers in Minneapolis (300 miles from the actual US border). I am worried about family members who live across the river in St Paul, Minnesota. The US, the country I grew up in and for which I still hold a valid passport, is undergoing a state-sponsored campaign of terror against its own citizens under the explicit direction of the executive branch. Talking about design today seems petty, but thinking about what is happening in the US made me think about why I do the job I do in the UK.

Years ago, when I was still a graphic designer working in New York, I had a few formative encounters that led me to understanding how design could be in the service of the public good. I came across little magazines (e.g. Dot Dot Dot) that presented a view of the world in which designed objects could represent intellectual positions. A world in which reading critical theory was a good use of time for people making posters about art exhibitions because design could imbue the world with meanings that ran deeper than surface aesthetics. Or at least that is how I understood it. Having been fed a diet of high modernism and postmodernism while being trained as a graphic designer, the idea that design could be a political act, that it could bring a world into being, seemed right. In practice, it was always hard to directly connect this ideal with the things I was making, but I wanted it to be true.

Today, I work for NHS England, an arms-length body of the Department for Health and Social Care. I haven’t always worked for the public sector, but I sought out this work because I wanted to apply my knowledge and skills to a domain that felt worthwhile, one that didn’t seem like it would contribute to the further enshittification of everything. I continue to choose to work here, despite all of the ways the organisation makes the work harder than it needs to be, because it is the place where I feel that I can best add to society through design.

I believe that design is a political act. I feel this in my bones. I am fond of the expression “strong opinions, weakly held,” but this is one idea that I will go to my grave holding firm. What we put into the world, as action or artefact, is how the world is made. Design is a way of engaging with the greater conversation of how to live together on a planet with limited resources. Design is thus politics.

I have plenty of interesting, difficult work to do at my job, and I’m thankful for it because the world is horrible right now. I’m glad I have a distraction that has a good and noble purpose. As a recently-minted UK citizen, I’m glad I don’t need to go back to where I grew up. I don’t know how I would remain sane if I did. I am fortunate enough to be able to contribute to the great endeavour that is the NHS, a collective project that represents more-or-less the exact opposite of what I see happening in the US right now. The daily work on this project is a salve against horror. I hope my small contribution to the public good can move the needle. It may not, but the choice of where to apply effort is really all I can control. With everything going on in the world, this choice is one small way to try to change the world.

While the team are making plans for what to design or research or build next, I’ve been hitting the road like some sort of wandering bard, telling the story of the work thus far. This past week I presented an update about our native re-platforming work to a handful of different groups. Some of these groups need to be kept up to date and some are just curious because the project is strange. Telling the story over and over again, modulating the points of emphasis each time, is a nice way to explore what aspects land with an audience.

There is a lot of ground to cover, but perhaps it is not surprising that the elements of the presentations that have garnered the most attention are the areas where we have deviated from our standard ways of working or ways of describing what we do. Texture, place-making, and vibes are the elements of the work that generate the most interest and elicit lots of questions. Those are not common topics around here but they are the words I’ve been using to emphasise how this work is special. The issues at hand are not about the value of a service, the clarity of content, or the efficiency of a journey. Rather, the elements that I have been focussing on are what kind of impression the overall experience makes on the end user. What emotions does it produce? Does it feel trustworthy? Can you sense where you are? What kind of mood does it inspire? These questions are subtle and the answers are elusive.

I realise that in our context, where access to care can be a frustrating or confusing experience for patients, making a fuss about what kind of vibe our products and services give off could sound absurd. It is touchy-feely hippie stuff in a world of brutal efficiencies, and yet everything I’ve seen over the last few months suggests it is really very important. Once upon a time, when gov.uk or nhs.uk were originally being conceived, this may have been a common topic of conversation. Today though, the basics of our design systems are largely settled and stable. Questions about how to produce the right feeling just don’t come up anymore, but providing care always has an emotional, affective dimension (biopsychosocial models of care, anyone?), so why shouldn’t this be part of how we discuss design languages?

We’re starting to untangle how to produce feelings. Our next steps are to isolate the novel variables and research them methodically so we can develop a more robust evidence base supporting (or rejecting) our current hypotheses. Given how interconnected the myriad design decisions we’ve made are, I know that this is going to be difficult.