And there we are! 2026 is here.
I had to rest up the week after getting sick.
I did take some time to write down 26 hopes for 2026 – following last year’s practice, inspired by Olu.
Formulating hopes for 2026
Here are my hopes for the new year:
- I hope we can manage the expected growth in the discipline and projects in the most healthy and sustainable way.
- I hope we can smooth out our design and user research operations as we continue to grow, including structures, formats and processes.
- I hope that, whatever the growth of the user-centred design discipline this year, we will remain close as a group who know each other and can rely on each other.
- I hope we can clarify career paths for everyone in our user-centred discipline to a high degree of satisfaction.
- I hope we can create new artefacts and formats that help others better understand our discipline’s work and its value.
- I hope we can raise the profile of the Service Standard as a mandated instrument across all levels of government.
- I hope we can significantly expand the handbook section of the Service Standard web offering, adding many valuable pieces of guidance.
- I hope we can refine our user-centred design leadership approach and share it with colleagues in the wider public sector.
- I hope we can establish a well-regarded blogging platform for the German public sector.
- I hope we can practically join forces with other public sector colleagues and pool resources and insights to get some shared components finally fixed.
- I hope we can create a narrowly focused ‘start a business’ service that we can then nicely grow in scope over time.
- I hope we can design more than one service explicitly linked to a wider life event.
- I hope we can establish meaningful exchanges on life events across government, informed by and in dialogue with the EU and the OECD.
- I hope we can extract lessons from our policy and service design work to create a comprehensive, integrated framework for us and others to work with.
- I hope we can make the justice data platform a well-visible example of open government data sets.
- I hope we can develop and publish the first page templates and service patterns, which then gain traction and be used by others in the sector.
- I hope we can launch several services with the cross-government design and identity system, demonstrating the power of consistency.
- I hope we can help government sort its brands and branding.
- I hope we can systemise our approach to inclusive research and build the processes and capabilities to support it.
- I hope we can set new standards for plain language across all of the services we look after.
- I hope we can gain proper traction with the gov.de and establish a scalable taxonomy for it.
- I hope we can use the forthcoming service quality criteria as a springboard for a broader, deeper establishment of a service lens across the federal government.
- I hope we can demonstrate, through the justice service portal, how to implement a service platform approach in a truly good and effective way.
- I hope we can strengthen our links to other national public sector teams through visits and exchanges.
- I hope we can run an in-person event connecting public sector design teams in Germany.
- I hope we can make a positive, tangible difference for people in this country on a larger scale.
I will review these hopes by the end of the year, as I did for my 2025 hopes in last week’s note.
Reading others write about design
When arriving in London on Thursday morning, I found my physical copy of ‘Competitive advantage by design’, a small publication from the GDS founders at Public Digital, waiting for me. I ordered it a few weeks back.
While reading through it, I realised it’s not really for me. It’s for their clients in the public, private, or third sectors who are intrigued by user-centred design but don’t yet fully grasp it.
The booklet contains easy-to-read introductions to service design, content transformation, and user research. It communicates the basics very well and makes the approach accessible. It’s a great little publication to sell user-centred design services.
Now, I wonder if we should take a cue from this publication. I have a big sweet spot for printed matter – see Service Gazette and the column magazine we have produced since 2023. Having a booklet to share with ministerial project partners as part of early engagement could be a powerful little explainer. I will brood a bit on this idea.
What‘s next
I will only return to work in the second half of next week.
For Friday, Anna and I have a half-day workshop scheduled. Anna is heading up our unit for government transformation instruments, which she just discussed with GovInsider. Anna and I plan to zoom out, look ahead, and review the priorities of all her work streams for 2026. I feel very close to the work she oversees – and I have spent significant time on the projects now bundled into ‘her’ unit. It includes the Service Standard and the cross-government identity and design system (‘Digitale Dachmarke’).
We had countless tactical and operational check-ins since her move into the role in mid-2025. But so far, we have lacked the time to look at things in a more interconnected way.