Monthnote: June 2025
My first monthnote since March as 2025 keeps racing by…
Outside of work, we’re now in the final stretch of the school summer term, which this year combines school trips, mock exams, and the usual mix of sports days, concerts and shows. There’s a lot to keep track of right up until the summer holidays start in a few weeks.
Since late March, I’ve also been busy sorting out our house. In between everything else, this has included sporadic days of decorating as we’ve gradually switched around children’s bedrooms and my office space. It all turned into a much bigger effort than I first anticipated.
Now this is sorted I’m strangely enjoying being in a new home office space – it’s a smaller room upstairs – but feels like a welcome change after 4 years of my previous set-up.
Work, including UX Scotland, and The Future of Hearing Technology event
Since Easter, work has been continuously busy, but I’ve been enjoying the challenges and mix of things each week.
June was centred around a trip to Edinburgh to speak at the UX Scotland conference. I’ve written about the talk here, unpacking the themes.
The trip for the conference turned into a good few days in Edinburgh, including a day before the conference for some overdue catch-ups with friends and former colleagues. I also really enjoyed the conference itself. Not just the speaking element, but it was great to connect and catch up with so many people, especially from the public sector. Laura Yarrow’s talk: Serious Work, Playful Minds was a highlight, and I enjoyed hearing Vinishree Solanki speak again: People or the Future – who are we failing? Co-Designing for trauma, fragility, and complexity.
I also spent some time in London this month, which included the chance to attend an RNID event: The Future of Hearing Technology, held at Glaziers Hall. A big thanks to Terry Makewell for the invite. It was an interesting evening with speakers including Harriet Oppenheimer (CEO of RNID) and Dr Dave Smith (National Technology Advisor for the UK Government).
Health
My personal NHS service safari continues …After waiting months for follow-up appointments, I’m now heading to see a regional specialist in Manchester at the end of July. It’s been a disappointing year with delays in access to the ENT specialists I need to see, but I’m hopeful this might give me some clearer answers, with further tests planned.
I’m still having to carefully manage problems with my hearing day to day, specifically my left ear. I’m affected most by noise exposure, which makes my hearing loss and tinnitus temporarily worse. This can also impact my balance, with some consultants I’ve seen still linking these symptoms to Meniere’s Disease.
It’s frustrating, but I manage symptoms okay most of the time. I’m also still confident that it doesn’t impact my work. But there’s an element of masking and any type of hearing loss or tinnitus can be extremely tiring – especially where you’re compensating or straining to hear people throughout the day. I can even find listening and speaking on calls physically painful as the week goes on.
What I’ve been writing…
After a quieter writing period, I’ve been in a good place since UX Scotland to turn my talk materials and notes into a series of blog posts, including some new ideas that have started to emerge. It’s been a productive few weeks of finishing posts, especially around AI-based themes, and you can find everything I’ve written recently in latest posts.
What I’ve been reading, watching and thinking about…
In terms of books, and as part of my research for UX Scotland, I read The AI Con: How to Fight Big Tech’s Hype and Create the Future We Want by Emily M. Bender and Alex Hanna. I tell everyone that it’s important to read and consider different perspectives about AI. I thought this book was well written with credible examples and research. Following the theme of big tech, I also read Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams. Both of these books made it into my talk materials.
I was pleased to get hold of a copy of Rebekah Barry’s new book: Considerate Content, published by Content Design London. This is essential reading for anyone designing inclusive and accessible services. Rebekah was kind enough to include me in a “people I appreciate” section at the end of the book. This was a lovely surprise, and a reminder of what a special content team we had at DWP around 10 years ago, led at the time by Melanie Cannon. Sometimes it’s easy to miss the impact and legacy of past teams you were part of.
I finished reading The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley which was a fun novel. I like most things that involve time travel. Speaking of which, I’ve just started reading Rob Hopkins’ new book: How to Fall in Love with the Future – Rob’s work brings the idea of time travel firmly back into a work context for me.
Something to highlight that I’ve watched recently is the new Adam Curtis documentary, Shifty, which is on BBC iPlayer. I wrote a short post about this, specifically about an Adam Curtis interview I heard that included a unique take on generative AI: The ghost of our time.
Related to the theme of technology and ghosts, when speaking about how ‘Agentic AI’ undermines privacy, this clip of Meredith Whittaker from Signal is the clearest insight I’ve heard about the difference between how technologies are currently being marketed and the types of access and control they would require to work as advertised: “…there’s a profound issue with security and privacy which is haunting this type of hype around agents.”
Returning to generative AI, I also watched a panel discussion from the Zeg Storytelling Festival, featuring Armando Iannucci and Christopher Wylie: The Elephant in the Algorithm. The panel here talk about how big tech’s leaders and CEO’s still don’t really know where AI is going. And how it’s really a marketing and investment story, where both the “optimists who say [AI] is going to solve all the world’s problems and the pessimists who say it’s going to kill us all – they both think the same thing which is that this thing’s going to be really powerful.” But then, how “most thinking people don’t feel that way, or at least are skeptical …Highlighting the mistakes it makes and that the hallucinations it makes.”
Some other notable blog posts and links to other people’s writing I’ve enjoyed and thought about this month:
- This post by Jon Kolko is excellent on synthesis and generative AI: No, you should not offload synthesis of your generative design research to ChatGPT.
- Tracey Wilson wrote a good post on a topic I still think is important and not talked about enough at the moment: We Don’t Need Smarter Chatbots—We Need Smarter Content.
- Moving away from AI, I thought this post about prototyping by Gavin Elliot was very good: Why I believe prototyping in code beats everything else.
- And if you want an example of how digital transformation should be done in localgov, read this post on LinkedIn by Adam Walther: describing the work of the council team at Woking.
- Finally, thinking about some of my own experiences with the NHS, this post by Ian Nelson hit hard: When the System Doesn’t Work, You Become It: Scanned Notes from My Daughter’s Hospital Bedside.
Springsteen
One highlight of the past two months has been seeing Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band in concert – twice.
I went to the first night of the European tour at the Manchester Co-op arena in May, and then decided last minute to go and see the tour again on its final night in the UK, at Anfield in Liverpool at the start of June. This all followed some excitement a few days before the Manchester concert when it turned out that the band was staying in the hotel next to our office.
Both concerts were great nights. Both were also politically charged, with Springsteen making strong statements about the Trump administration.
I last wrote in 2016 about seeing Springsteen and the E Street Band in Manchester, pointing to this article at the time: A Bruce Springsteen show makes you feel like the best version of yourself.
“…it’s to do with being middle-aged and being grimly aware that existence is a series of compromises, and that if life has a purpose then it is in finding the moments of hope and joy amid the disappointments and troubles. It’s about balancing freedom and obligation. It’s about separating the moments of truth from the lies that life tells us.”
All of this, and I also turned 46 at the start of May.
Walking
With so much else going on, I didn’t manage any serious walking in June. However, I had a busy couple of months heading into the Lakes during April and May. I’m now close to completing all the Wainwrights in both the Eastern and Central Fells. I just need to get some momentum going again as better weather returns – I’m currently at 131 Wainwrights completed, which is 17 more added to the list since my March monthnote.
That’s all for this month.
This is my blog where I’ve been writing for 20 years. You can follow all of my posts by subscribing to this RSS feed. You can also find me on Bluesky and LinkedIn.