What the National Design Studio Will Learn the Hard Way

Elizabeth Goodspeed's latest op-ed in the Architect's Newspaper about the White House's so-called national design studio gets one thing exactly right: the problem being solved here isn’t real.

There is no unmet demand for government to feel like an Apple Store. What people want is for things to work: benefits to arrive, permits to process, taxes to file, appeals to be heard. None of that shows up on a landing page.

Spending nearly 8 years as a federal employee at 18F.gov, so I understand the complexity of shipping services to the public better than most. I can recount countless encounters with faceless bureaucrats and lawyers who insisted improvements were impossible because rules prohibited them.

During the Twitter era, posts calling out broken .gov experiences circulated constantly, often tagging 18F with the question of whether we could fix them. We wanted to help. The cost recoverability model meant assistance depended on agencies with money to spend. Promotion of services violated the rules. Agencies had to come to us on their own.

Watching this administration ignore compliance, rules, and decorum while 18F staff once had to gatecheck every attempt to make things better is difficult to witness. It also highlights how remarkable the organization's impact was over nearly eleven years. The apparatus emerged from a civic tech landscape that has since vanished. Patching government with short-term technologists focused on fixes does not build durable capacity.

The National Design Studio will run into the same walls its predecessors did when their benefactors run out of juice, when the people building the websites get bored of making patronage baubles. Until there's a better understanding from CIOs, political appointees, and leaders at every level about embedding tech fluency into the work, we're going to keep arguing about fixing the damn websites.

The real problem is a policy problem.