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Last Friday, the Sunlight design team played hooky and spent the day around the corner at AIGA DC’s first DotGov Design Conference. In a city where more than one in three workers are employed by the government, it seems only appropriate that the design community would find itself focusing on design for governmental and political purposes. While the work that many D.C. designers do is heavily weighted in this direction, it hasn’t necessarily been a focus of design community events and trainings until recently.
The DotGov Design Conference was organized to support government designers, but it was also welcoming of anyone from other groups who work closely with government agencies. This was to our design team’s advantage, since we all share the goal of making government data more accessible. Moreover, whether or not you’re a designer working in government, topics like usability testing and managing a design team are relatable across all fronts.
Government and good design may sound like oil and water, but there’s evidence that agencies like 18F, USDS and CFPB are beginning to change the game. This event offered a dedicated space for government designers to build a community and share ideas for innovation in the limiting environment commonly imposed on government projects. From our perspectives, some of the more obvious constraints for government designers include:
Often, the end result of projects that face these issues are government websites or services that don’t pay enough attention to user needs, ultimately failing in usability and accessibility of information. At DotGov Design, it sounds like these issues are at least being recognized now, if not resolved just yet: One session considered the idea of having a living style guide for government properties, while another one led by IDEO discussed human-centered design.
Our design work at Sunlight is treated quite differently. We have fewer constraints and more room to play, to be creative and to experiment with new technology. We have much more support across the organization, which allows for design to be a priority in our tools and products. And while our tools as a whole may have value to citizens and the general public, in reality, the data we deliver are most often used to enhance and inform the work of a smaller audience made up of advocates, journalists and beltway insiders. Nonetheless, we were still able to walk away with some valuable ideas.
At the end of the day, we left with new ideas that sparked great dialogue and challenges for our design team; for instance, how to make our design process more open like our code, and how to better work together on large projects. We definitely have our work cut out for us, but when a conference leads to a post-event brainstorm about optimal corndog ingredients, you know it was a success. (The winner, if you were wondering, was five-spice chicken and basil.)
The Sunlight Foundation is a non-profit, nonpartisan organization that uses the power of the Internet to catalyze greater government openness and transparency, and provides new tools and resources for media and citizens, alike.