04 March, 2015

The next generation of civic designers — Medium

The next generation of civic designers — Medium:


In the world I work in, it’s about 1998. Think about what that means.

In
the late 1990s, the Web was becoming a thing, but large organizations
had yet to embrace it much. The back-end systems were moving to
client-server from mainframes. And the Dot Com bubble was growing and
about to burst a year or so later. Technology was a thing that happened
in the basements of enterprises and was very mysterious.

Ok,
to say it’s 1998 is actually not entirely fair. It’s more like 2005.
Before ubiquitous computing. Before wifi everywhere. Before smart
phones.

And this 2005 feeling is actually almost every day in
the here and now. Every day that I work in civic design, it feels like
I’m entering a time warp. I step through a door at a county office or a
city hall or a federal agency, and the light changes. I start in Oz and
go back to Kansas.