Note: This post gets into American politics. If that’s not your cup of tea, or if that’s a stressful topic for you, please feel free to skip this one. (Also, it’s a bit long. Sorry about that.)
Last week, my country’s far-right administration announced they were establishing an “America by Design” initiative, along with a so-called National Design Studio to oversee it. That studio will, to quote its own homepage, “improve how Americans experience their government — online, in person, and the spaces in between.” After seeing the announcement, I read through the “America by Design” web page. And I have some thoughts.
I mean, there are the surface-level observations. The text is poorly written, and filled with typos; I expect both of these things on my website, but not on an announcement of this scale. And aesthetically, the design is…well, tepid. Once you get past the literal flag-waving in the header, there’s some text that slides in as you read — something you’ve seen on every other product site that’s launched in the last decade. If this is meant to herald a new era in design for the federal government, it is a singularly meager vision.
But I don’t want to get mired in the aesthetics. Let’s look at how the site was built — after all, that’s part of “design.”
We’ll start with the fact that the “America by Design” site is a single HTML page, not unlike the blog post you’re reading. But to make those words appear in your browser, this new “national studio” used almost three megabytes of code. Imagine having to download a three-minute MP3 each time you visit a web page, and you’re in the ballpark.
I realize that doesn’t sound like much, especially by the standards of today’s slow, heavy, overbuilt web. But imagine you’re one of the millions of Americans on a prepaid “pay as you go” plan, or on a home network with capped, limited data. In both cases, data overages are tremendously expensive. Now imagine you’re trying to access some critical information online — how to renew your passport, say, or to manage your Social Security — and you’re met with a web page that is literally too expensive for you to view. An overbuilt, too-heavy website isn’t exactly a rarity on today’s internet. (Sadly.) But this design is coming from the federal government, which is quite literally meant to serve every citizen — every single one of them. The American people will be poorer for this work, figuratively and literally.
And it’s not just the sheer weight of the page. As inclusive design experts like Anna Cook and Jesse Gardner have noted, this one page is waterlogged with accessibility errors. Low-contrast text, looping animations that can’t be paused or hidden, poorly-structured HTML, images with missing (or incorrect) text equivalents: any one of these errors would be an annoyance. Creating a single page with literally hundreds of accessibility errors will exclude anyone who doesn’t conform to the designer’s narrow definition of “a user.”
In other words, we’re left with a web page announcing a new era of design for the United States government, but it’s tremendously costly to download, and inaccessible to many. What I want to suggest is that these aren’t accidents. They read to me as signals of intent: of how this administration intends to practice design.
A web page that’s literally too expensive to view? It aligns with this administration’s war on the poorest and most vulnerable residents of this country: they’ve passed legislation that will push millions of people off of Medicaid, and are discussing ways to destabilize, if not directly privatize, Social Security. And the awful accessibility isn’t a surprise, not when the current administration is already ignoring its legal mandate to create accessible digital services. (Heck, the current website for the actual, literal White House is a broken, inaccessible mess.) But it also aligns with the administration’s open embrace of eugenics, and with their disregard for disabled Americans. After all, an anti-vaccine extremist is in charge of, and is actively dismantling, the country’s health apparatuses.
So, no: I don’t think it’s an accident that a simple-looking “America by Design” page is built the way it is. It’s communicating their priorities, and how this government wants to redefine design. This “national studio” is designing for the small subset of American citizens who fit their ideal of who can afford, and who can access, the digital services they’ll create.
There’s one last thing I want to mention, but it involves digging into the text a bit. In it, the studio talks about how the “America by Design” initiative will transform the process of interacting with the federal government, turning it into a more “Apple Store like [sic] experience.” It even lists a few examples:
Something you actually look forward to when you…
Pay off your student loans,
Move through TSA,
Renew your passport,
Visit national monuments,
Apply for a small business loan,
Apply for your green card,
Stay the night at a National Park,
Manage your social security.
Even file your taxes.
(Emphasis theirs, not mine, and for reasons I fail to understand.)
Throughout the page, the suggestion isn’t just that the federal government traffics exclusively in poor, ineffective design; it’s that this is the first time anyone has ever proposed changing that.
Of course, that’s — well. Let’s go with “laughable.” First and foremost, it ignores designers and digital teams currently employed by the federal government, who work to make their agencies’ services more user-friendly. And it ignores the United States Web Design System and the people who maintain it, and how their labor makes government services more accessible and consistent. But it also ignores the United States Digital Service and 18F, two digital service agencies tasked with improving the way the federal government built and acquired software.
(I should note that many of the hypothetical scenarios above were, in fact, projects being worked on by those last two groups — or they were, until this administration shut them down after taking office.)
As I’ve mentioned before, I worked at 18F. During my too-brief time there, I saw exactly what it meant to improve the experience of renewing your passport, or providing an easier way to file your taxes. Despite what this new “studio” would suggest, designing better government services didn’t involve smearing an animated flag and a few nice fonts across a website. It involved months, if not years, of work: establishing a regular cadence of user research and stakeholder interviews; building partnerships across different teams or agencies; working to understand the often vast complexity of the policy and technical problems involved; and much, much more. Judging by their mission statement, this “studio” confuses surface-level aesthetics with the real, substantive work of design.
The thing is, there’s something difficult wrapped up in that.
There’s a long, brutal history of design under fascism, and specifically in the way aesthetics are used to define a single national identity. Dwell had a good feature on this in June:
Part of Mussolini’s vision for Italy centered around producing a totalizing image of Italian identity — not Tuscan or Roman or Sicilian. (As [Ignacio Galán, author of Furnishing Fascism] notes in the book, during the Risorgimento one popular saying was, “We have made Italy. Now we need to make the Italians.”) In Mussolini’s opinion, the creation of a national identity could engender patriotism as well as uniformity. If he and his buddies could convince everyone that ideal Italians worked hard, maintained a clean home and healthy body, and believed in the supreme leader above all else, then they could more easily control Italians writ large.
Throughout the text, there’s a single-minded emphasis on aesthetics over design. We’ve already seen that in the studio’s disregard for the page’s weight and accessibility — and now we’re seeing it carried through the page’s text. Design for this “national studio” is about surface-level signals of “experience” and “beauty,” instead of the messy, iterative, imperfect work involved in designing something for people. When this “national studio,” and the administration that created it, tells us it wants to create “an experience that projects a level of excellence for our nation”? That’s aesthetics with a nationalistic twist, and we should take them at their word.
It’s in that light I’d like to revisit something I said earlier: when the administration suggests nobody has tried this before, I don’t think it’s just arrogance. It’s an extension of this administration’s fascist relationship with history.
Since taking office, this administration has worked to position itself as the arbiter of what constitutes “acceptable speech” and “acceptable history.” It is censoring the histories documented by our nation’s museums; it is rewriting curricula to erase the already marginalized; it is canceling artistic grants that don’t align with its goals; it has defunded public broadcasting. So when the administration says here that now, for the first time ever, someone is attempting to do something to fix the nation’s digital services, I don’t think it’s an error. It’s an act of erasure, in line with the other parts of the authoritarian project we’ve seen unfold since January.
Because, yes: this “America by Design” page is shoddily made, and poorly written. But the authoritarian impulse — to erase histories, to control a narrative, to single-mindedly focus on image and aesthetics — shapes not just the site’s text, but its design as well. Its text erases the history and work of the people who quietly labored to create better digital services for the public; in their place, it proposes that one man alone can define “design” for the country. And we find that new definition in the way the site’s constructed: it is digital design intended for the privileged few, one that actively excludes people who don’t conform to a specific, discriminatory definition of “eligible.”
All of this should and must be rebuked by the design community; it must also be actively, urgently dismantled.
This has been “A notional design studio.” a post from Ethan’s journal.