Dan Howarth

Help. A washed-out old balloon has landed in my garden. Should I feed it?

The awesome Sam Villis (@stamanfar.bsky.social) hosted the first #OneTeamGov virtual meet-up of 2026 this week. One of the things we discussed was doing a 10th anniversary #unconference next year in 2027. Please like and repost if you're interested.

Technical design *is* business process design *is* team design *is* service design *is* user centred design. If you insist that one is superior to another or that you don’t need to concern yourself with all aspects, you’re doing your organisation and your users a disservice. This course looks great!

Bagged my copy.

Work in or around the #PublicSector? Fancy a breakfast time natter, and optional co-working day? The last 3 #OneTeamGov North #Manchester meetups of 2025 are on Tuesday: 🐝 21 October, 🐝 18 November, 🐝 16 December. Sign up via www.eventbrite.com/o/hosted-by-...

I've just published a report sharing the findings from a survey into the prevalence and effectiveness of different organising structures for content teams. (Thanks if you took part!) lapope.com/2025/09/22/u...

Many orgs drown in strategy documents. They can't find alignment because they've said too many things in too many documents. Their way of fixing it is paying someone to go in and create one document to rule all documents. Let's listen to Giles and stop creating more strategy documents! 🙌

Human artists, use only one piece to convince people to follow you.

[blogpost] Recruiting and Retaining [Public] Service Technologists – beyond improving the salaries digitalbydefault.com/2025/04/23/r... Inspired by the recent @britishprogress.bsky.social report on improving DDaT hiring I went off on one 😆

#ServicesWeek to return for its seventh year ✨ Please share and save the date: 17 to 21 March 2025 This event series aims to grow service literacy and is open to all UK public servants. Take part if you can! #ServiceDesign #GovDesign #LocalGov #LocalDigital services.blog.gov.uk/2024/12/19/s...

Money talks: estimating the cost and value of service design. @ClaraGreo and I wrote an article about this for The Service Gazette. Let us know what you think :) medium.com/the-service-...

100 followers and we promise to start planning the next Content Teatime...

I wrote a book! The timing is... weird, to say the least. But it's here, it's real, and it's available for purchase at your favorite online bookseller. Buy a copy. Buy several. I won't judge. Note: I was fully unprepared for how weird it was to hold my own book in my hands.

Your org cannot design or deliver functioning ecosystems because it does not have controlled lists of things, types, what each thing is, standards, definitions and naming conventions. Boring to many, in comparison to fancy Figma doodles, but you can't do anything meaningful without them.