#28 A new contract, AI and Posters
Week of 26 January – 1 February 2026
Summary of the week
A week of firsts. A new contract role started, an AI Design Sprint delivered and the Natural England posters finally out the door. A lot landed this week.
New contract
This week I started a new contract role as a Service Designer for three months. It was a heavy week mixing client work and the new contract alongside everything else. Lots of onboarding with various people in the chain when you work as a contractor. I'm so glad this has come along and is perfectly- timed, because my runway was looking uncertain for App Build.
There is always a change period with something new. New rhythms, new people, new ways of working. I am finding my feet and enjoying it. It's been a while since I have been contracting. I love the variety and the value you can bring by working with lots of different companies. You have to learn quickly, and deliver things in a short time. Accelerated learning.
Finally, after 6 years, I have achieved something I set out to do, which was to go back into contract freelance work after changing careers and working my way up from junior roles back to a a more senior level. It's been hard over those years, taking in an income half of what I was on before. In order to go freelance, this was something I had to do. Unfortunate timings of previous roles when I was due to get promoted, the design team was made redundant or was facing redundancy with companies striping out costs.
AI Design Sprint™
In Nottingham, I ran an AI Design Sprint™ workshop with a group of service designers. This is the session I love to run, and it was so great to have the topics and conversations that people really wanted to engage with. We created lots of AI solutions and then we added a layer of ethics to it. What would happen if we didn't think about human displacement, data protection and the environment. It was its 3rd birthday. I remember going along to the first ever meet up and our pizza box was used to help shape the ingredients needed for a gathering.
Service designers bring such a sharp, human-centred lens to how they think about problems, and pairing that with AI Design Sprint™ methodology, which is very holistic, made for a worthwhile visit. The conversations in the room were brilliant people genuinely wrestling with where AI fits into their work, what it changes, and what it does not.
A few pics from the session taken by Paul Bailey
Dot and Dash
The Natural England posters are done and collected. It was genuinely satisfying to get those over the line. After being in progress for a while, it felt good to hand them over. Myself and Alice had a session working through Slido, looking at the tools and how to use them well for our upcoming session together at the conference.
The Let's Rock It meetup happened this week too. Meeting up with the fellow cohort of Lego®️ Serious Play ®️facilitators I trained with. There is an upcoming conference that I am still on the fence about attending because of the cost. Plus, its a smaller conference, and I am not entirely sure if it will be worthwhile. Given that I will lose out on a day rate too with my contract work.
There was a pathway off the Plateau meeting with Sheffield Digital about potential workshops for companies in the South Yorkshire region who were on a program of support to get unstuck. This work sounds right up my street! pretty excited for this if it all gets agreed.
More IAF conference work is ticking along, and there is a real push to get enough ticket sales to meet the first payment milestone. Feels like a bit of pressure on us to get everything out comms-wise.
Admin
Admin week alongside everything else. Timesheets, emails, security checks for contract work, onboarding training ..the works. Contract work comes with its own admin layer, and I am finding a way for my ND brain to cope with lots of new systems again. It will settle down once I get a system in place. Feels like I have been juggling a lot of different things this week.
I wonder...Service designers spend most of their time in large, complex public sector organisations, but so much of that thinking translates directly into smaller ones. I apply it in my work all the time. I wonder if more small businesses would value it, if they knew it existed for them too? I'm bringing elements of this into the ND Entrepreneur community.
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