Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder
Make The Eagle Bigger
Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2008 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.
You may have heard about information architect Sean Tevis running for state office in Kansas. He worked on the campaign logo himself. If you're looking for silly stories about the campaign trail, there you are.
After our oldest, first female, or first nonwhite president, maybe we'll be ready to elect a president with a deep understanding of human interface design. This "Archident" would make sure the Presidential Daily Briefings clearly highlighted imminent threats and critical information, and would give US residents single-payer healthcare just as an act of user interface mercy. Any post hoc changes to federal websites or the Congressional Record would be recorded in a Subversion-like record management system for ease in search and retrieval, and to discourage Orwellian history erasures. The State of the Union would include Steve Jobs-esque Keynote accompaniment, a far cry from Ross Perot's posterboard charts or the school-project volcano dioramas that grace the floor of the House today.
Also s/he would have a blog. And constantly be redesigning it. With a White House IT team on call 24/7. And I'd probably be the poor PM dealing with the constant random enhancement requests. So maybe we should wait on a PresIAdent.
Comments
Brendan
http://www.xorph.com/
17 Aug 2008, 22:19 p.m.
Martin
19 Aug 2008, 22:31 p.m.
Oh hey, it's that guy who did the slightly embarassing but nonetheless charming xkcd campaign ad.
An Archident would be great, but personally I would love to see any no-shame, hands-down geek in the Oval Office. But with Al Gore out of the picture, who's waiting in the wings? If only we lived in former Soviet bloc, where elected leaders are expected to know how to patch KDE2 under FreeBSD! Frankly, I think that would be worth the tradeoffs.
"#947504 IMAP Post-By-Voice
Pretty self-explanatory. Since the last few requests have been pretty low-hanging fruit can we have this by Monday? :)"