Graphic equalizers
Matt Webb (part of a two-man London-based design consultancy called Schulze and Webb) just finished a presentation about Generation C - people who expect control, complexity, and social connections. It’s not an age group but a state of mind - and this entire conference is GenC, as is an increasing percentage of the population and therefore an increasing percentage of the people for whom these egovernment systems are being/going to be designed. Today’s designs tend to be one-way: washing machine has a single interface. Why can’t we hack it so it only offers the settings we use? Orput a graphic equalizer on the front as the selection mechanism instead of these old dials and knobs? Webb showed off a couple of their design ideas, a little robot that plugs into your USB port and falls over if your IM buddy goes offline. Governments tend to want to issue monolithic systems, but they’re going to be awash in users who would like to reshape the system according to their own desires, whether that means scraping data into a more usable form (RSS and XML instead of PDF and DOC) or shoving a graphic equalizer on it (why not have one for your bank and credit accounts?) to make it more fun.
wg
March 31st, 2007 at 8:22 am
“Generation C” is another good way of breaking open the question latent in Trans-gov and half-explored in Varney of “should we plan e-services for citizens or for customers”. They’re not the same thing at all, as Mel Dubnick points out in a post I highly recommend:
http://www.idealgovernment.com/index.php/blog/comments/adjusting_to_nomads/
CITIZENS seek (1) access (2) engagement and (3) accountability, and
CUSTOMERS seek (1) choice (2) service and (3) satisfaction.
Meanwhile the NOMADS of the future seek (1) options (2) immersion and (3) sustainability.
Does “Generation C” express something similar to McLuhan’s “nomadic gatherers of information”? These notions have started to enter Downing Street thinking in the final days of the Blair administration, and they’re wholly at odds with much of what has been implemented (eg patient records) and what is proposed (eg an imposed national biometric ID System).
April 1st, 2007 at 9:12 pm
For blindside wiki entry on this see
http://www.blindside.org.uk/wiki/Generation_C_-_the_knowledge_nomads
April 3rd, 2007 at 2:55 am
I have several times written something similar about customers vs citizens - apart from anything else, customers may choose their supplier; citizens can’t, usually; also, as citizens we elerct our governments and have more right to determine how they behave than customers do. I think it’s important to resist the recasting of citizens as customers.
wg
April 4th, 2007 at 3:11 am
I am not quite sure the Generation C idea is quite the same as the nomadic, mainly due to the focus on control, which I think makes is closer to the “customer” model. The desire for control presumes the existence of certainty about preferences and priorities, and I don’t think that is quite what drives the emerging nomads. The immersion factor — being dropped into a setting of new and unfamiliar options (links) that can lead you into a completely different setting, etc. — provides the nomad with a sense of satisfaction that does not come from “consuming” but rather “experiencing”.
The folks I feel really captured this are Sherry Turkle of MIT and Janet Murray of Georgia Tech — and especially Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck” and Turkle’s “Life on the Screen”, which are already more than a decade old. Turkle focuses on what happened when MIT students became immersed in the first MOOS and MUDS; Murray has taken immersion into literature and gaming. I think these folks really capture the nature of the shift to a nomadic culture, and the designers of e-government should be looking in those directions for hints of where the emerging generation might be — I guess we would call it Generation-I (for Immersed) or Generation-N (for nomadic)….