A working notebook. Things I'm thinking about, things I've made, things that aren't ready to be anything else.
Teaching Tools V1 - 4th May 2026
Three interactive tools I use to teach service blueprint, value proposition, and futures methods and a small experiment in what happens when a designer who teaches can build their own instruments.
- Service Blueprint Live lets students edit a blueprint in the browser and toggle into a journey-map view. Most service failures live below the line of visibility; the tool tries to make the below-the-line work feel like the actual work.
- Value Proposition Builder runs a five-step bottom-up process: concrete enablers, clustered into engagement drivers, described, and composed into a statement. Built because students tend to start at the statement and reverse-engineer the rest, which produces value props that sound right and don't survive contact with users.
- Signals & Trends uses STEEP as a scaffold for speculative work. Capture signals, pick the strongest three, articulate the connection, pressure-test the resulting trend statement.
The tools were built with Claude as a coding partner across a few evenings. That fact is part of what they are, not a footnote.
For ten years, the gap between "I have a teaching method that works" and "I can hand my students a thing they can use without me" was a developer's gap. I'd run workshops with slides, whiteboards, and printed canvases, and I'd wish - in roughly the same way every time - that the workshop could leave the room with the students. It mostly couldn't. Building the version that travelled was someone else's job, and someone else's budget.
That gap has narrowed sharply. Not for production software, where it remains a developer's gap, but for the specific class of tool that needs to be used by about twelve students for two hours. For things that small and that local, a designer who can prompt clearly can now close the gap themselves. The interesting question for me isn't whether this is good or bad - that's the wrong frame - but what teaching becomes when the instruments stop being aspirational. I don't fully know yet. These tools are part of finding out.