Jonny Muir : Service Design – From Potato Peelers to Butterflies

Now with added AI and Automate! Join us for an evening exploring Service Design, digital architecture, and how Umbraco can be used to build much more than a traditional CMS. We spend a lot of time talking about how to build things, but the real magic often happens when we work out what to build, who we're building it for, and why they need it. This month we're joined by Jonny Muir — Designer, Computer Scientist, and two-time Umbraco MVP — for a journey from industrial design (primarily to maintain a tenuous link to potato peelers!) through to digital architecture, service design, AI and Umbraco Automate. The Talk Drawing on decades of experience across public and private-sector case management, pension administration, hyper-local community projects and environmental humanities, Jonny will explore how good Service Design can shape the way we approach digital projects. Using foundational principles from the Nielsen Norman Group (NN/g) and the Government Digital Service (GDS), he'll demonstrate how Umbraco can be used declaratively as an enterprise-scale case management system. We'll also take a look at Wayfinder, the open-source framework Jonny has been developing over recent years, and see how Umbraco's Block Grid and package ecosystem can support both front-stage and backstage user experiences. Then we'll move onto Umbraco Automate, showing how it can turn complex workflows and support systems into first-class parts of an Umbraco solution with little to no code. Finally, we'll look at how this declarative approach works alongside AI, allowing you to rapidly iterate as a designer towards the solution you want. What to expect Service Design principles applied to real digital projects Umbraco being used beyond the traditional CMS use case A look at the Wayfinder framework Block Grid and the Umbraco package ecosystem Umbraco Automate and declarative workflows How AI fits into a declarative approach Real-world examples and practical ideas Who Should Attend Anyone interested in how Umbraco can be used to design and deliver more complex digital services. Whether you're a developer, designer, architect, technical lead, project manager, or simply curious about different ways of approaching Umbraco projects, there should be plenty here to take away. And whether you're building a massive enterprise platform or a community record store, you'll see how naturally Umbraco can fit into the Service Design ecosystem when it's given the right frameworks. Agenda 18:30 – Mingling + Pizza 19:00 – Introductions & Umbraco news 19:15 – Service Design: A story from potato peelers to butterflies 20:15 – Open Social + Networking