Opening the first day of the User Needs First conference in Amsterdam, Kara and I had the opportunity to reflect on the now. We gave a talk about ‘protecting our practice’. We gave it the subheading ‘how to not let things get undone’.
Our previously submitted description said the following:
Over the past few years, we’ve seen government organizations increase their user-centred maturity – and then lose it again. More recently, we witnessed role-modelling organizations be dismantled. Denmark lost its groundbreaking innovation unit, Mindlab. In Canada, the Ontario Digital Service was shut down. Now, in the US, mass firings of digital specialists and the 18F team happened over night. We have been faced with the reality that government organizations do not mature and progress as we imagined them to. So, what does that mean for our work, practices and values? How do we navigate these times of disruptive change and rolling back from accessible, effective and better quality services? Any change of government or senior leadership can endanger our work and practices.
In this talk, Kara Kane and Martin Jordan highlight the stories of people who are still trying to make change from the inside of institutions who no longer advocate for digital and design specialists. They leave the audience with some tips for how to brace for change or move through the change already here.”
Right after editing the Service Gazette and Hillary Hartley’s article on digital service resilience, we used some subheadings from her to structure a segment of the talk.
After the talk, various people approached us and told us how much the theme and content of the talk resonated with them.
We managed to record the talk and finally got online.