Design For America!
First of all, let me say that I know I haven’t written on my blog in ages, and I apologize. There have been many changes in my life, and I’ve gotten a little wrapped up in them. There will be much more to come in the new few weeks, I promise.
Right now though I want to talk about something really exciting I’m doing at work that I haven’t promoted much, but really want to push. In case you haven’t glanced at the rest of my site, I currently work for the Sunlight Labs section of the Sunlight Foundation, promoting government transparency. A good chunk of my job is to help grow the community of designers and developers that are willing take government data we collect and help do useful things with it. The other side of my job is to push the government to take a more critical look at their site designs and to rethink them not only visually, but to rethink the user experience as well. Right now on many government sites it’s too hard for citizens to find what they’re looking for and that shouldn’t be the case. It’s challenging work, and I very often get government employees who aren’t very happy with me because let’s face it, change is scary. So… the solution? I believe we need to overwhelm the government with good design. Us designers need to come together to show the government that even with 508 compliance rules the products they push out can be amazing. To promote this idea Sunlight is putting on a contest, , to bring together designers to produce some design for good and maybe even win a little bit of prize money in the process.
The evil words “spec work” have been brought up once or twice around this contest, but let me assure all of you that Sunlight is a non-profit and so we’re not out to make money off of this contest or your designs. We just want to show off the amazing work that all of you do so that we can go to the government and say, “this is what we do outside of the government, and it’s what you can and should be doing inside of it.” After having worked for the government myself for a while I’ve found that it’s more effective to try and change it from the outside and I hope that all of you can join me to promote that change.
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