Remembering Mike Cooley

“Mike Cooley may well be the most intelligent Irishman, the most morally engaged scientist and technologist Ireland has sent abroad.”

President of Ireland, Michael D Higgins, 2018

Without Mike Cooley there would be no human centred design.

Sadly, he died in September 2020, but this wonderfully passionate…

For fifteen weeks from the end of March 2020 we ran a weekly one hour ‘Distanced Gathering’ for Scotland’s service design community, but open to anyone. The focus was on small group conversations about how we were coping and what we hoped for in the future. Every Thursday at noon…

“Leadership is not defined by the exercise of power but by the capacity to increase the sense of power among those led. The most essential work of the leader is to create more leaders.”

Mary Parker Follett

Writing in 1924, Mary Parker Follett in her book The Creative Experience set…

Guidance for helpers

These notes draw on best practice that we’ve seen from other similar groups, and have been checked by a consultant surgeon and senior nurse.

• We will set up a WhatsApp group and all communication between helpers will go through this. If any meetings are needed we will…

I never enjoyed pickled fish until I lived in The Netherlands. Now I can’t get enough of the stuff. This is the tiny house I lived in right in the centre of Amsterdam from 1982. I was funded to live and study in The Netherlands under pilot scheme that later became the Erasmus Programme. Working in a multi-national research institute while the UK was at war, taught me the redundancy of any form of politics that involved flag waving. In short, it changed my entire worldview.

I may lose my EU citizenship at 11pm tonight, but I will remain an internationalist European with a taste for rollmop herrings.

Unie dans la diversité.

Exploring the territory between theatre and design

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

If you want to find out what theatre can bring to design, then Germany is perhaps the best place to do that. Alongside its rich tradition of radical creativity in both fields, there are…

In the twelve years that I lived in Stoke-on-Trent there was a recurrent joke that did the rounds at election time — there’s no point voting in Stoke, so the joke ran, they may as well store all the Labour votes in the town hall and take them out for…

How do we make new connections between those in Dundee working or interested in service design? How do we share what we’re doing? And how can we raise our collective ambitions? …