AI and service design: resources and somewhere to start, Recording coming soon±

Resources to accompany my talk at the Service Design Breakfast Club with Clearleft in Brighton, 5 November 2026.

I started experimenting with AI because I had too much on my plate. That led from sorting out everyday admin to building services for my family, making sense of research and getting prototypes in front of users much sooner.

For me, the opportunity is less donkey work and more room for the things we bring as designers: understanding people, asking better questions and deciding whether something actually helps.

Recording coming soon: I’ll add a recorded version of the presentation to this page in the next few days. Bookmark this page and come back for it.

People worth learning from

• MacSparky’s Robot Builders Club and Robot Assistant Field Guide — David Sparks’ practical guide and community for building a personal AI assistant on your Mac. The club is included with the paid Field Guide.

• Cal Newport: Automate Tedium, Protect Thought — Cal joins David Sparks and Chris Bailey on Intentional AIto discuss where useful automation ends and outsourcing our thinking begins. A particularly good companion to the deep-thinking part of my talk.

• Deep Questions with Cal Newport — Cal’s own podcast, covering focus, technology and doing work that matters. His thinking helped get me experimenting.

The tools behind the examples

• ChatGPT — a starting point for exploring a problem, working through ideas and developing useful instructions.

• Codex — the tool I used to build and iterate interactive HTML prototypes, working from established needs and journeys.

• Microsoft Copilot — the tool I used with Word notes, Teams transcripts and SharePoint material at work. What it can access depends on your organisation’s setup and permissions.

Keep the design work at the centre

• Microsoft’s HAX Toolkit — practical guidance and patterns for designing how AI systems interact with people.

• GOV.UK: analyse a research session — a useful reminder of the judgement involved in turning observations into findings and deciding what to do next.

• The Science of Storytelling, Will Storr — a further read for thinking about how we communicate our work and tell stories people want to follow.

Try something small

Pick one recurring problem in your own life. Establish the need and what a better outcome would look like. Make a version small enough to try, then iterate through prompts and testing.

Keep a dry run between an idea and an action in the real world. Check the outputs, protect time to think, and keep going back to real people when you need to learn something new.

I’m still learning too. Connect with me on LinkedIn and tell me what you’re trying.