A thing I wrote for the PSFK magazine - available here.
PDF here: Download Need to Know PSFK Magazine Faris On Creative Processes NEW
[Title of this post is stolen from Homer the Heretic, who, it turns out, lives in Oregon.]
Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/benterrett/7041509709/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Putting the public [user] first, in delivering digital public services.
It sounds delightful, doesn't it?
An open government with clearly stated principles? [digital or otherwise]
Like the opposite of Brasil [the movie, not the country.]
My mate Ben is giving it a go - he's the new Head of Design at the UK's Government Digital Services [GDS].
[congrats btw mate. That's really, really awesome.]
[Ben once won me in a competition.
It's true.
His old agency won the best branding idea for the Orange Business awards and we were their agency and they won an ideas workshop with me.
I suspect they liked the money they got more.
But I think it was a fun workshop because, well, we're still friends.]
He's precipating a bit of a revolution, taking some of thinking about beta and transparency and openness and collaboration and all that lovely stuff we've been cluetraining at clients for the last decade or so, and applying straight to the government.
And it's looking rather lovely so far.
After the digtial principles above, they published these design principles a few days ago:
You can almost certainly apply these to whatever it is you do [Advertising for example. Or anything. Probably.] - so why not go have a look at the full explanation of each.
Go read this blog post Ben wrote explaining what they are doing too. It's great.
They even published a colophon of the technology stack.
[Do you know what a colophon is?
I didn't.
In publishing it's a little note in the book that tells you about how it was printed or made, what fonts were used and that.
So, in this instance, it's the people behind the Government Digital Service, showing us what technologies were used to make the Government Digital Service.]
This is really lovely stuff, good work Great Britain, a digital initiative to be proud of.
The entries have been culled down to the top 30 in our very short film festival for BMW.
That means, since they are all 5.9 seconds long, you could watch them all in 2.95 minutes.
[Assuming perfect bandwidth and very fast clicking...tell you what round it up, say 3 minutes.]
In a world of diminished cultural latency, where speed is of the essence, alacrity the key, we hoped this intense constraint would reflect the culture and mediascape we operate in but, also, lead to some really interesting entries as people struggle against the clock.
{Constraints are the soul of the brief}
So, why not pop over, have a look, and vote for your favorite and help someone win a BMW 3 Series?