Hypertext theory and public sector Service Design share a common concern – the structured movement of people through complex information spaces – but have developed largely in parallel, with different vocabularies, methods, and blind spots. This paper brings the two fields into conversation. We argue that Service Design's human-centred methods and practitioner tradition stand to gain from Hypertext's formal vocabulary of links, trails, transclusion, and structure, and that the domain of civic services urgently needs Hypertext's theoretical constructs: Citizens have no choice but to engage with government services and the stakes are rights, resources, and dignity. The design of a link structure may determine whether a citizen can access healthcare, assert a legal right, or navigate bereavement without unnecessary hardship. The stakes only increase with the emergence of platform government and life-event taxonomies. We compare the fields across subject, scope and method, and identify several sites of productive encounter. Spatial hypertexts offer a more expressive alternative to linear journey maps and service blueprints. Structural computing provides primitives for modelling seams, shards of identity, and conditionality in civic access. The theory of trails supplies a framework for citizen agency and recourse. We close by arguing that Nelson's question of who owns the link becomes, at civic scale, a question about state accountability to citizens. We sketch a research agenda for civic hypertext along formal, empirical, tool-building, and critical axes.

Early hypertext research was deeply concerned with governments. Bush [15] starts from the information needs of the allied war effort, and Engelbart's augmented team envisioned lavish resources (personal workstations!) provided to an elite team that might well be a war cabinet or a ministry [22, 54], or a new Manhattan Project  [37]. Some of the early research funding came from the CIA [30] and the US Department of Defense [1, 6]. Screenshots in early papers often reflect the needs of intelligence or policy analysts [36, Figures 1-3].

Over time, government and hypertext lost interest in each other or, more accurately, government came to regard hypertext as a tool for infotainment, mass surveillance and control [61]. We propose to renew the relationship, not by refining the experience of rulers but rather by improving the provision of government services [65]. Though digital government is (at present) almost universally motivated by considerations of cost, it may be possible to provide better government services that are more transparent, more respectful, and less intrusive than services designed with older approaches [62].

2.1 Origins and Tools

2.2 Service Design in the Public Sector

2.3 Service Design in the ACM and Academia

Conventional views of hypertext focus on navigation through a space of pages or lexias connected by links [34, 47]. Navigation is prominent even in alternative formulations, such as locative [56] or spatial hypertext [2]. Hypertext, as conventionally conceived, offers powerful ways to represent and conceptualize service design. The familiar navigational model of nodes and directed links [34] can readily represent constraints imposed on services (e.g. the ways that laws constrain the delivery of benefits) as well as constraints that services themselves impose (e.g. you might need to possess both a passport and a ticket to board a flight). Fresh understandings of the complexity of narrative [14, 29], often associated with postmodernism and illuminated by hypertextual experimentation [47], echo recent understandings that services are not simply prescribed courses of performance. At minimum, the actors in a service existed before the service interaction began and each inevitably brings a bundle of expectation, anxieties, beliefs (potentially false) and prejudices to a service interaction.

Public services are frequently cast in terms of assisting people who face a sudden or urgent need. Aneurin Bevan, for example, wrote that “No society can legitimately call itself civilised if a sick person is denied medical aid because of lack of means.” [11] At times, the service must provide for situations in which a specific actor cannot perform tasks that designers expected. The fellow who has just suffered a broken ankle should not be required to fill in complex forms before receiving treatment. A vital concern of service design thus stems directly from Engelbart's augmentation agenda [22] and seeks to provide prosthetic support for people who might find themselves needing it [18].

A speculative approach to hypermedia, structural computing [60], resonates with service design in interesting ways. All hypertext research inclines to structuralism or at least to a concern with form, but structural computing attempts to centre structure as its atomic construct. This maps in an entirely natural way to a core problem in Service Design. In principle, a server prefers to process requests that naturally suit its internal data model; if it administers a table of names and addresses of registered voters, delivering a table row is its natural bent. In practice, however, this might deliver too much information: if we want to confirm that an individual is registered to vote, we do not want and should not have access to their traffic tickets [65]. If we are adjudicating a disputed parking ticket, we do not want and should not have access to the citizen's political affiliation. Structural computing suggests that servers provide data slices that might be larger than individual table rows but narrower as well. Linkage specifies not only source and destination, but also the shape of the data that can flow across this connection.

Drawing on previous approaches to disciplinary comparison [39], this section discusses the parallels between Hypertext and Service Design in terms of subject, scope, and methods.

4.1 Subject

4.2 Scope

Hypertext focuses on networked information, be it web-based or otherwise. Its scope encompasses interaction from individual readings of a text to emergent behaviour at scale. A simplified view of the Hypertext community sees it comprised of engineers and literati [35] with corresponding shifts in scope between them.

Service Design, by contrast, is agnostic about information's scale: its UX-derived tooling addresses individual interactions while its ’zoomed out’ tools — blueprints, system maps — address aggregate behaviour. One might propose a naïve parallel in which each community divides along the same individual/emergent axis (1), but this is too simplistic. The e-literature tradition concerns aesthetic and interpretive experience as readers construct meaning from non-sequential narrative, and assumes a sovereign reader who chooses to engage. The citizen navigating disability benefits or bereavement services is doing something practical and potentially urgent, and has no such choice.

Figure 1: Scope of Hypertext and Service Design - scale of human phenomena vs. kind of service and text

Yet, even the theory of literary hypertext might inform service design. Much as we have learned that stories are not simple progressions from beginning to end [29], our trajectory through a service and, ultimately, what the service signifies to us, may be complex [31]. The citizen may have no choice but to engage with the bereavement services portal, but we now understand that the way they interpret what they see there—the way meaning inheres in the service experience—is determined by the experience they bring with them, not only on what appears on the screen [7]. Experiences do not unfold chronologically; an experience with bereavement services necessarily involves past and future. Any attempt to plan the future will likely lead to consideration of past memory and present contingency [29]. A citizen filing an application for benefits is bound to have a general sense of whether the interaction is going well: can they sense the approaching conclusion, or does the site keep trying to address them in Norwegian Bokmål [51]? Indeed, Platformland motivates service design with reference to the political and aesthetic rejection of the Means Man and intrusive means testing [62].

4.3 Methodology

Service Design relies on qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups), with occasional use of quantitative methods (analytics data, surveys) for design and evaluation. Hypertext tends to privilege formal and theoretical methods such as structural modelling, system design, and close reading of link semantics (Figure 2). Empirical work in hypertext skews towards computational analysis of large corpora rather than the study of individual human experience; where user behaviour is studied, it has more often been measured than interpreted.

It is no great leap to consider that structural computing offers an approach for modelling the structural topology of services, with prospects for greater nuance.

Figure 2: Scope of Hypertext and Service Design - human scale vs methodological stance

Service Design attempts to tackle complex, multidimensional spaces unsupported by the theory-rich inclinations of spatial hypertext, structural computing, and the politics of the link [32]. Platformland implicitly asks for something like meaningful links between life-events and institutional responses — a connection that Nelson's transclusion and trails were meant to enable. Hypertext has thus far neither studied nor modelled the framing, constraints and needs of different service organisations that may only be connected by the user's traversal.

5.1 Civic Spatial Hypertext

5.2 Transclusion at the Seams

Bush's trails, in original conception [15] and in later realisation [27], suggest that the paths citizens take through services should be recordable, revisable, and shareable. Service design platforms have largely failed to implement this principle, and if paths fade and things go awry, the citizen may have no recourse against the bureaucracy [38, 41]. If the path is owned exclusively by the bureaucracy, the path itself (or its forgery) becomes a tool of surveillance and a vector of oppression [50]. For example, in the British Post Office scandal, officials falsely accused postmasters of fraud in order to cover up software errors [55, 73].

Hypertext's long concern with reader agency offers a vocabulary for thinking about citizen participation in service design [53]. Vitally, citizens not only need to have agency; they need to experience their agency, appreciate the limits of what they can do, and be able to learn, when barriers appear, how to negotiate seams and boundaries. In this connection, it is highly desirable to allow radically nonlinear paths through the experience: if a problem arises, say, in establishing a detail of a medical diagnosis, the citizen might still be able to make progress on other aspects of a claim and the sequence of operations ought to be based on their needs rather than what a bureau expected.

Not only should citizens be able to pursue alternative paths, but they should be able to discover those paths, even if they happen to be pursuing an unusual or unexpected trajectory [26, 63]. A search field may not suffice. The citizen may not know what tasks are needed, and it is the responsibility of the service to make the path forward evident.

Web services inherited the Web, not hypertext. Nürnberg and Atzenbeck critique the impoverishment of hypertext as it is implemented in the web [3] [59]. This is further diluted by layers of platforms, APIs and intermediated services that privilege integration, metrics and control over the simplicity, openness and direct linking that originally defined hypertext. In particular, service designers need links not just as pointers, but as structural claims about relations between nodes.

Conventional Service Design tools — journey maps, service blueprints, system maps — are static diagrams that show links between nodes. They do not express the links’ semantics, the grammar by which they are composed, or conditionality. We can illustrate this with Pope's “shards of identity”, an approach to selective disclosure. If I need to establish that I am eligible for a service that is intended for adults, instead of sharing my date of birth I share that I am indeed within the requisite age range.

To do this, the link needs to carry semantics:

A standard hyperlink cannot convey this kind of information. We can, however, model a shard of identity as a structural relationship between citizen, credential authority, and service. It has an assertion, scope, validity conditions, and a disclosure boundary. Service Design lacks a mechanism for conveying this nuance, which is the kind of rich structural abstraction that structural computing argues the web's primitive link model cannot express.

Wardley Mapping, a service design approach to understanding complicated value chains in a business ecosystem [74], is ripe for this kind of interpretation and modelling. A Wardley Map is structurally a directed graph whose edges simultaneously express dependency, visibility, and evolutionary stage: it offers richer link semantics than the web's anchor-to-resource model. This kind of modelling of public service components calls for the type of semantically expressive link structure that Nürnberg and Atzenbeck advocate for [59].

Nelson's transclusion was partly motivated by a concern about what travels with content when it moves. In transclusion the content's context, provenance and ownership remain attached. Pope's shards of identity address the inverse problem: what should not travel with a citizen through a journey. Both are about semantics of connection, the meaning of a link, what it does and does not carry.

This plays into the citizen's relationship with the state: who owns the citizen's identity information? Is the state's knowledge deliberately fragmented and scoped? If ever there were a design choice with political consequence, this is it.

Each siloed department has its own data model, identity scheme, and navigation logic. Their political and budgetary interests, moreover, often depend on defending their data from rival organisations.

Shards of identity address one dimension of this, proposing an intentionally minimal standard for credential exchange. Structural computing could be more ambitious, proposing not just standards for the exchange of credentials, but standards for expressing the structural relationships between services: What it means for one service to be a prerequisite of another, what it means for a life event to contain a set of service relationships, what it means for a navigation path to be valid or invalid given a citizen's current state.

At the lowest layer of this framework, existing standards such as the W3C's Verifiable Credentials, OpenID Connect, and the BC Wallet address the issue of credentials, but the structural issue around the layers above asserting credentials (navigation paths, service relationships, life events) remain unaddressed. Structural computing might just offer a formal approach that can meaningfully address this gap.

Adaptive Hypermedia's user and adaptation models [20] [76] show what it would take to make link structure responsive to the person traversing it, although that personalisation sits in direct tension with the minimised system knowledge that shards of identity are designed to enforce.

Pope's vision of “platform as substrate” and "life event as organising principle" argues for effacing departmental silos and envisions rebuilding digital government around events that matter to citizens rather than institutional structure. This is information architecture at civic scale. Nelson talked about who owns links [58]. We propose two further questions: Who benefits from links? And who is accountable?

When a government builds its digital platform around life events, someone has to define those events. Pope lists starting a business, having a child, moving house, becoming unemployed, leaving prison, and managing the affairs of someone who has died. This taxonomy has implications for citizens: the choice of life events determine what the system can see and act on. For example, if "becoming homeless" is a life event, one might expect a set of coherent aligned services. If it is not, the needs of unhoused populations might be distributed across departments providing housing benefits, mental health services, and support for rough sleeping or substance use. The second scenario heaps significantly more friction and invisibility upon the affected citizens and their service providers.

In other words, enumerating life events may decide, whether with intent or not, what experiences are worthy of official recognition. Who controls the life event taxonomy and service connections? These are profoundly political questions whose answers have implications for what the state can do to and for citizens, and what citizens can know about and claim from the state.

Hypertext research and practice have deep roots regarding who controls links and how link structures affect navigation, not least what the person traversing them is able to access [8, 9, 15, 48]. This is ripe territory for the application of hypertext theory to service design practice.

Although it does not couch it in these terms, Platformland asks how to implement hypertext at civic scale. Differences of scale lead to methodological consequences: hypertext's formal models were never designed to describe a citizen's interaction with fifteen government departments as they apply for disability benefit. But what if they did? Of particular interest is that, in Platformland, nodes are independent computational entities that may need to negotiate with each other in complex ways. When these negotiations break down, moreover, we must anticipate further rounds of negotiation, ideally without alarming the citizen.

Consider an applicant for bereavement services: the system contacts several agencies to disambiguate names, obtain identifiers, and verify dates of birth and citizenship, filling in much of the form on the applicant's behalf. Such negotiation ought to be transparent and seamless. Where it throws an exception, whether an unpaid parking ticket or a security flag arising from the deceased's military service, it should be resolved without alarming the applicant with fresh bureaucratic tasks.

Again, the vision of Platformland has a productive tension: a state proactively anticipating citizen needs and reaching out to meet them, and a state whose knowledge of citizens is deliberately minimised and carefully scoped by selective disclosure. Insufficient attention has been paid to Kleinberg's discovery that data minimisation may be insufficient; identity may often be deduced from extrinsic clues such as a person's anonymised social network [5]. Design alone cannot resolve this tension: indeed, this is a political question about state reach. What travels across a link, what links may (or must) be traversed, and who controls link structure? Hypertext Theory may be equipped to articulate and address these questions on behalf of Service Design.

Hypertext rhetoric has often been concerned with helping readers select the most appropriate links [13, 46, 49], but we must remember that links are always multivalent [10]. They mean more than one thing. In order to know what lies at the end of a link, we need to go there; partial information may help, but we can never be sure it is enough. In designing services, moreover, we cannot always assure immediate satisfaction; among the necessary links might be some that a citizen might be reluctant to follow [67].

A synthetic framework of civic hypertext might envision links that support relationships between documents, concepts, and services. Trails would act as a reading history and a life history. Transclusion becomes not just a publishing mechanism but a means of selectively dissolving institutional seams.

Platformland is a practitioner's intuition toward this, and hypertext theory offers a formal vocabulary to make it rigorous. In return, Service Design's focus on human experience offers tooling for the hypertext community: Hypertext research is sparse when it comes to thick, qualitative human-centred investigation of what it is like to navigate. This is especially true in the long term; we know too little about navigating through a hypertext novel or textbook, but we know almost nothing about navigation on a scale of months or years. Civic hypertext, which must support people asserting their rights to services, assuredly needs these practices.

We have argued that hypertext theory and public sector service design share a common concern that neither discipline has fully articulated on its own: the structured movement of people through complex, institutionally-bounded information spaces in which the stakes — rights, resources, and dignity — are high.

We have shown that the conceptual vocabulary each field has developed independently maps onto the other in productive and sometimes surprising ways. Navigation and journey, link and touchpoint, transclusion and seam, trail and audit record: these are not synonyms, but their differences are generative. Where Service Design has powerful human-centred methods and a practitioner tradition oriented to real institutional change, it lacks the formal representational vocabulary to model the semantics of connection, the conditionality of access, and the politics of link structure. Where Hypertext theory has that vocabulary — in structural computing, spatial hypertext, and the theory of trails and transclusion — it has seldom directed it at systems that serve citizens who have no choice but to engage.

The convergence is not merely theoretical. The emergence of platform government, selective disclosure, life-event taxonomies, and proactive state outreach makes the question of who controls link structure a matter of civic consequence. Nelson's question — who owns the link? — becomes, at civic scale, a question about the accountability of the state to its citizens, and about what the state may know, infer, and act upon. Hypertext theory is better equipped to articulate this question than it may have recognised, and Service Design needs a framework that can hold it.

We propose that this encounter constitutes the beginning of a research agenda for civic hypertext that can be pursued along several axes:

formal modelling of service structures using structural computing primitives;\

empirical, qualitative investigation of citizen navigation in high-stakes services3;\

development and evaluation of hypertext tooling for service design practice, assessed against service design's own normative criteria (be agnostic of organisational structure, explain why a decision has been made, have no dead ends [21]) alongside classic usability heuristics [68]; and\

sustained critical attention to the political consequences of structural choices in civic platforms.\

This paper's limitations are real: the argument is theoretical and the provocations require empirical validation in real institutional contexts. Future work should engage with the rich datasets now available from digital government platforms, develop the worked examples only sketched here, and bring the methods of hypertext research — formal, computational, and critical — to bear on services that matter to people's lives.

Research for this paper was supported in part by access to the collections of the Harvard University Libraries. We thank Nate King for his thoughtful review of an early draft. One of the authors thanks the University of Southampton for the honor of a visiting fellowship.

1Conway's Law may come into play: The structure of a system – or service – tends to mirrors the structure of the organisation(s) that designed it. [19]

2For example, critics have observed that the UK websites for courts and tribunals are found in the GOV.UK domain, although they are not part of the government as Britons understand the term, but rather part of this state.

3A healthy foundation of data underlies Service Design in its evaluations of services at scale (for example on https://www.data.gov.uk/ and https://github.com/alphagov). These datasets represent under-studied tools for the study of information architecture validation and navigational behaviour at large.

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