What Should the United States National Design Policy Look Like?
By Adam Zoltowski
The CATALYST Blog recently featured a post by Anna Whicher & Gisele Raulik-Murphy on the Sharing Experience Europe (SEE) Project, indicating the momentum behind Design policy developments in Europe. In their first bulletin, SEE discusses the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative and its approach to establishing a U.S. design policy. Why does the U.S. need a national design policy? The answer is present in the plethora of functions we carry out on a daily basis that could be simplified and made easier by good design.
Imagine how design could improve the efficiency of our health care system, or make our banking system less troublesome and confusing. Could we have escaped a national economic crisis if our financial system were better designed? Design has recently become a powerful competitive tool for companies; why couldn’t it act as one for our government? These are all questions that we don’t have definite answers to. While I don’t wish to speculate, I believe that society is always better off when design is used well and with the user in mind. Design also has the power to give America a competitive edge. I also believe that this issue is not a question of ‘why?’ but ‘what?’ followed by ‘how?’ What should our national design policy look like and how will we get it done?
In the last few years The U.S. National Design Policy Initiative has been working to raise awareness for the need of a national design policy. Their most recent summit, held in December of 2009, gave rise to some thought-provoking results as to what the most important steps are in establishing a national design policy. They successfully set forth three strategic policy proposals for 2010:
- Introduce into K-12 educational curriculum learning modules on design creativity and innovation.
- Preparing and publishing case studies/examples of design’s social, economic, and environmental positive impact.
- “Round tables” with the design community, government agencies, and stakeholders.
Essentially, there is a need for collaboration and cooperation between the government and design organizations. In order for all parties to benefit from the partnership, the value of design must be successfully communicated. Though the importance of introducing design and innovation to educational curricula cannot be overstated, I wonder if it’s too soon to ask for before design’s value receives a wider public understanding and appreciation. Once this is achieved, the policy can be made more detailed, with more clearly defined touch points. I think that there should never be regulations on font sizes, colors and other aesthetic choices, but there should be standards on usability, open source access and other elements that aim to make design more accessible.
David Hoffer of Frog Design Discusses Design Policy, as a part of a series of submissions to the U.S. National Design Policy Initiative
So, what would you include in a national design policy? Would it have different objectives than those listed above? Should our policy proposals be more granular? More importantly how do we get these proposals made into actual government policy? With pressing issues like Iraq, health-care reform and an economic crisis that won’t go away, it’s hard to get design to the front of the line. I’d love to hear from some of our readers what our nation’s design policy priorities should be and how we can get the job done.
*While researching for this post I read this article published last summer by Allison Arrief in the New York Times. Written before the 2009 Design Policy Summit, it provides a good primer on the value of a design policy.
2 Comments on "The U.S. National Design Policy Initiative"
I think one of the main advantages of the US Design Policy Initiative is that it could reference as much data as possible from other existing and older models of design policies from around the world.
Also, while some design policy movements are more mature (the UK’s, for example), and some more aggressive (maybe Singapore’s?), the US design policy’s main defining feature may have to be its focus on social inclusion as it is a country founded on diversity.
That is a good point. We definitely have a lot of examples to pull inspiration from. The challenge, which I believe is the challenge of all policy decisions in the United States, is to draft something that is beneficial to all. It’s often a double edged-sword to have as much diversity as we do here. On one hand it provides us with a multitude of resources while on the other hand we often have too many options to choose from and specific cultural needs to satisfy. That is what I view as the real challenge: designing something that meets the needs of all involved without being watered down.