This week — DOTIfest, Christal, Tinder and CO2

Ben Carpenter
Nov 1 · 2 min read

Snook’s DOTIfest was a highlight, as was hanging out with my boys on Monday. We went swimming. I went on the slide. We played water volleyball. We had hot chocolates from the vending machine at the DIY shop.


DOTIfest was ace.

I loved Shanti Mathew’s description of service design as ‘working with people less powerful than yourself so that you can represent their needs to people more powerful than yourself’.

Alastair Parvin blew brilliant holes in the ridiculous planning system — I sat on my hands.

Paula Steel and Jon Foster taught us about the extraordinary yet commonplace crime of ‘cuckooing’ in social housing.

Thembe Mvula read her beautiful poetry, and it belonged in our world of human-centred design just as much as any deck, map, double-diamond or post-it.

Kate rightly said it was a dudless day. For me this was because:

  • It wasn’t about tech or the internet
  • It was about helping people with problems
  • It included by default the nature people need for life-support and life-satisfaction

Esther Perel is a therapist, and I’m finding her podcast fascinating, powerful and very human — it’s just recordings of her one off sessions with couples. The topics rarely correlate exactly with my headspace, but there always a lot that resonates. If you listen, let me know what you think.


I stayed up until 1am on Wednesday. This is extremely late in my 44 year old father-of-two world.

I was visiting a getting-divorced friend. We hung out with his Divorced Dads Club friends. We ate burgers and shared a £250 bottle of Christal champagne. They showed me Tinder.


Civic duty. Many civil servants I know are pondering how their roles and climate action. Carbon emissions may not be my direct remit, but climate breakdown is the biggest civil threat, and I’m a civil servant, so…

It does feel like government’s user-centred designers / thinkers / transformers are really getting into gear on climate breakdown. There’s so much stuff bubbling up. Conferences, Trello boards, networks, meetups. It’s the biggest design challenge there is. Come on, Designers Assemble!

https://twitter.com/benaldo/status/1189931747128963072

Hilariously, I will now go and pile up wood in my garden, to burn on Sunday for our bonfire party. I’m reminded again that bashing individuals for being imperfect products of a system is daft and mean. Meanwhile, the system frantically greenwashes.

-end-

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