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Not the main point of @bm.wel.by's piece, but this sent me on a bit of a jag about the importance of ritual and occasion-making in public services and how we can lose that through digitisation.

Seeing gangs of teenagers clutching envelopes on the streets today makes me think that things like getting exam results (and getting married!) are also about community, peer support and shared experience. We can easily neglect these in our push to individualised, friction-free digital services.

I'm not arguing that we shouldn't enable people to do these things digitally – it's important for accessibility and inclusion that we do. But perhaps there should still be things that are inconvenient by default. Collecting that first passport or driving licence. Divorce.

Curious how service designers think about this.