Practice

The work changes. Certain decisions keep recurring.

This page draws recurring ways of working from the projects shown on this site. It does not list everything I can do or impose a method on old work; it looks for patterns that can be supported across different contexts.

Evidence boundary. The work shown here is selective and currently reaches back to 2015. It should not be read as a complete account of thirty years of practice.

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Practice claims · 01

What keeps recurring

These are the strongest claims the work shown here supports. Each is tested across the five canonical project families before it is treated as a proven recurring part of the practice.

01 · Proven recurring practice

Start with the situation, not the inherited structure.

Across the work shown here, a recurring first move is to question the structure that arrived with the brief. A content portal can become a service around working moments; a migration can become a coupled delivery system; regulation can become assessment reasoning; a self-service default can become a facilitated environment.

This is a contemporary interpretation of recurring decisions. It is not terminology claimed to have been used by the historical projects themselves.

Evidence across the work

02 · Proven recurring practice

Keep connected decisions connected.

The work is strongest when decisions that affect each other stay in conversation long enough to improve each other. Product and engineering, platform and content, regulation and interaction, facilitation and interface are not automatically separate workstreams just because an organisation can draw boxes around them.

Connected ownership does not mean one person owns every organisational decision. The claim is about keeping consequential dependencies visible instead of turning them into premature hand-offs.

Evidence across the work

03 · Proven recurring practice

Solve at the scale the problem requires.

Sometimes the useful unit is an interaction. Sometimes it is an experience, a platform, a product or the relationships between them. The work shows the unit of design widening and narrowing with the problem rather than treating one discipline or deliverable as the permanent centre.

Artefact, experience and system describe useful scales, not a hierarchy of value and not a branded sequential method. Earlier forms of making remain first-class inside broader system work.

Evidence across the work

Current operating description

A current way of describing the movement

Frame. Shape. Make. Evidence.

These are overlapping modes, not four steps. The language describes the practice now; it is not presented as terminology used by the historical projects.

Strong emerging pattern

Frame, Shape and Make are visible broadly across the work shown here. Evidence as an explicitly named discipline is strongest in current work, so the four-part set is not presented as a historical methodology.

01

Frame

Clarify the situation, audience, constraints and the problem that is genuinely worth solving.

02

Shape

Turn that understanding into product, learning, experience or system architecture before inherited implementation becomes the brief.

03

Make

Prototype, design, build and produce at the scale the problem requires — from interaction to system.

04

Evidence

Separate intention from implementation, observation and validation; qualify what the work can safely claim.

Evolution · selected work

The practice has widened in scope

The work shown here suggests a widening unit of design since 2015: from interaction and facilitated experience into regulated learning systems, platform and content architecture, then product and connected-service work.

This is not a ladder. Earlier forms do not disappear as the work widens; artefact-making remains first-class inside experience and system work.

  1. 2015 · Artefact · Experience

    Interaction became a facilitated environment.

    Pathways stretched an authoring tool into a non-linear, stateful environment built around the conversation happening in the room.

    Read the analysis · Designing technology to support a conversation, not replace it

  2. 2015–21 · Artefact · Experience · System

    Learning design widened inside a regulated system.

    Course artefacts, assessment reasoning, responsive context and production practice sat inside six years of broader learning work in an aviation safety regulator.

    Read the analysis · Designing for examiner judgement rather than recall

  3. 2024 · Experience · Content · Platform

    The platform and the course estate became one delivery problem.

    Migration, learning architecture, more than sixty rebuilds and operations had to move concurrently rather than wait for clean hand-offs.

    Read the analysis · Designing the platform and course rebuild as one system

  4. 2026–27 · Product · Experience · System

    The unit of design widened to a connected service.

    Product strategy, experience architecture, service relationships and production implementation now operate together while still resolving into useful participant moments.

    Read the analysis · From content portal to connected wellbeing service

Practice claims · 02

What is still emerging

Some patterns are strong enough to notice but not strong enough to promote. Keeping that distinction visible matters more than making the Practice page look complete.

Strong emerging pattern

Make complexity usable without falsifying it.

Complex systems often need to become easier to understand without becoming simpler than the truth allows. That tension is clearest in regulated learning and is becoming increasingly explicit in product and evidence architecture.

This pattern is strong, but the work shown here does not yet support promoting it to a proven recurring part of the practice.

Strong emerging pattern

Design technology with human activity, not instead of it.

When a useful human relationship already exists, the digital product should know whether its job is to support that relationship rather than automate it away.

This is strongly evidenced in two project contexts. It remains an emerging practice claim rather than a universal statement about every project.

Specialist production depth

Tools are materials, not the practice

Storyline recurs across the historical work, but the evidence is useful because of what the tool enabled — not because software expertise should become the architecture of the practice.

Evidenced specialist depth

Storyline, when the interaction carries the learning

TAFE used it for a non-linear, stateful careers environment. CASA used it to make assessment reasoning visible inside regulated professional learning. ISQ rebuilt more than sixty Storyline courses while the destination platform was still being shaped.

Specialist Storyline detail

Evidence contract

How to read a practice claim

Practice can interpret the work. It cannot outrun it. Stronger language requires stronger recurrence and stronger evidence.

Proven recurring practice
Supported across multiple projects and contexts.
Strong emerging pattern
Repeated and credible, but narrower or too contemporary to impose retrospectively.
Single-project evidence
Useful evidence that remains bounded to one project until recurrence appears.
Aspirational positioning
Direction or biography that may be useful, but is not presented as proof.

Follow the evidence

The interpretation is only useful if you can inspect the work.

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