Week 33 - Iterate, brutalism, retrospectively
iterate, iterate, iterate ➰
Something we’ve been looking at recently on the Green Gas Support Scheme is addressed.
We found out through research that these Gas plants will likely not have postcodes but Ofgem needs to know where these things are.
So we had a few conversations and came up with a few ideas to try. latitude and longitude, grid reference and what 3 words.
I’m particularly interested in looking at what 3 words, I mean if the AA use it I’m sure we could too.
Minimum viable product
As the deadline for Green Gas Support Scheme creeps ever closer I’ve found myself doing a lot of prioritisation. I feel like as a design matures (like a good cheese) you become a lot more involved in conversations about which bits we can lop off for launch.
Guest Lecture
I did a guest lecture at my old university this week. this is my second year doing it. talking about my career so far and how I got my first job in the industry and had a super interesting conversation with the students about emerging technologies like designing for voice.
Retrospective
A few weeks ago we did a retro into your community meetups and gained some really good feedback, we were running two-hour sessions a week, One a ‘formal’ Design review session on a Tuesday and a community meetup on a Thursday.
Lots of the feedback was that these two sessions were becoming too similar and people wanted some time to just hang out and chat about life and our interests.
So we actioned this feedback super quick. We’ve kept the design review sessions for governance?! (I'm sure there is better work than that) and moved the Thursday session to Friday morning. More of just a coffee morning vibe
I think doing retros is super important. We’ll probably run one again in the future as the community keep growing
That’s Brutal that 🏢
The Dorman Long tower in the Boro was destroyed this month, even though historic England advised it should be granted grade 2 listing status.
This building being destroyed is quite sad to me, I had quite fond memories of seeing this tower every day when I worked in Blaydon at my first ‘proper’ design job.
If you into all this brutalist stuff, especially up north you should buy a copy of Brutal North by Simon Phipps one of my favourite lockdown buys last year
Events
Something we’ve been thinking about is running some proper Designed and Made Events. Getting in speakers, Us speaking about stuff and that.
I think the most important thing we’ve been thinking about is what does a post-pandemic event look like? totally virtual? All in person? Some kind of hybrid?
How does a hybrid event even work? Lots of questions which I'm sure in time will be answered
Mark