@dlootz
Designer in civic tech. Former 18F + NASA. Musician, video game enjoyer, and Chicagoland transplant. Mostly re-posts of people cooler than me. he/him. Woodworking journey: @okay-woodworking.bsky.social luetger.com // 18f.org
Users hate AI. So tech made it mandatory. Even if you don't use it, it pollutes what you read and how systems make decisions. The computer's hallucinated word is final.
And it needs all of your data to do it.
In the age of no consent, UX exists to normalized complete acquiescence to surveillance:
“you cannot kill me in a way that matters”
It’s been one year since the elimination of 18F. 🧵
MAKE AN EMERGENCY DONATION to Trans Continental Pipeline right now.
They are a Colorado based org that helps trans people relocate there and they are overwhelmed with requests. CO borders KS, and TCP has the infrastructure to help get people out.
GO DONATE.
tcpipeline.org
My org @nngroupux.bsky.social is hiring for a UX role. If you know someone who might be interested, let them know!
www.nngroup.com/news/item/jo...
hallo, I am hiring again! - SF Digital Services is looking for a new Engineering Director careers.sf.gov/role/?id=374...
This reports directly to me, & I’m looking for a practical & flexible technical expert with excellent communication & coaching skills, who is excited to do both. More below...
Americans have a habit of trying to compare all authoritarianism to Nazi Germany. I think in some ways i think it is comforting to view authoritarianism as a foreign ideology. If you want to understand our current authoritarian moment, you need to look to our own past, not to Europe 1/x
Public digital services need to be *so much better* than anything the market offers. You can't switch. You can't get fed up and choose to pay a bit more at Ocado than Sainsbury's because the UX is better. You can't opt out of public services because you're digitally excluded.
I joined design experts in speaking with the writer of Fast Company’s recent article on Joe Gebbia as the first U.S. Chief Design Officer, sharing concerns related to America by Design and its failure to design for America.
www.fastcompany.com/91458973/chi...
This is exactly what I mean when I say that UX has no value when the business model is not "make a thing people want and sell it for more than it costs to make."
The top 10 most profitable tech business models these days are different kinds of scam. You don't need design for that.
"What took generations to build is being dismantled in months, and with it goes not just expertise but what remains of the shared American faith in expertise itself."
they'll kill you then steal food from your neighbors for complaining
In which Matt explains how once again our supposedly amazing “National Design Studio” fails to use simple web tools that have been around since 1995
Russ Vought (piss man) tweet about doing piss man shit: The National Science Foundation will be breaking up the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado. This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country. A comprehensive review is underway & any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.
NSF is about to dismantle NCAR at Russell Vought's direction to protect the fossil fuel industry. It's hard to communicate just how much NCAR does, so let's take a look: I've never worked at NCAR, and I've worked with NCAR researchers once ever. What scientific discoveries has NCAR made possible? 👇
Here's the free tip about federal digital service surfe teams, bringing out of context staff & throwing them at problems solves very little unless they have a mandate, expertise in the areas where they are parachuting in.
Most of all without knowledge transfer it'll be wasted effort.
This summer, Brett Murphy, @peterdicampo.bsky.social and I went to South Sudan, where the U.S. had been supporting the response to a historic cholera outbreak in the world’s poorest country before pulling the plug.
We found shuttered clinics and dead bodies. www.propublica.org/article/usai...
it's taken me a while to put this together. but I hope, if you've never heard of her, or even if you have, this tribute to Alice Wong buoys your heart and gives you a good sense of who this incredible person was. www.coyotemedia.org/remembering-...
“It’s an insult to designers, it’s an insult to people who build with thought and care, and it’s an insult to your intelligence as a consumer of websites.”
Please read Matt’s thread.
No one wants to build bad products. But in an industry where programmers implement features to order, it can be hard to shake that feeling.
This is how orgs see the ROI of UX: as a soothing function to tell everyone they're doing a good job. And as a scapegoat, when we finally learn otherwise.
Some brief thoughts on the so-called "national design studio" makingpublicwork.com/what-the-nat...
"The existing NDS sites therefore behave more like billboards than public infrastructure. ... What makes this shift hardest to justify is that the federal government already had ... [an] office whose job was to actually make government UX work better. From 2014 to 2025, that work lived inside 18F."
I am sorry to report that the only solution to poor government digital services is the hard work of improving them.
“…not all human needs can be contorted into a profit-generating activity.”
After 15 years across local→state→federal, a simple truth keeps coming back: people don’t want innovation. They want things that work.
New essay on the blog: Stuff should work.
blog.ronbronson.com/stuff-should...
I have struggled so much to tell “the story” of what the hell went down at the beginning of the year, even to my closest friends and family. John summarizes it well in this thread.
Last week I hade the opportunity to speak at @dotgovdesign.bsky.social about accessibility in the civic tech space, why we should all start using assistive tech, and why improving our skills as practitioners is so critically important in this moment. jaredcunha.com/blog/dotgov-...
Come work for me! I'm hiring at @usdigitalresponse.org—somebody with experience as a government procurement FTE who wants to join me in providing pro bono support to governments in the U.S. who want to move to a user-centered, Agile software procurement approach. Remote, full-time, $145–165k.
“…‘I live in this town and I am in favor of this new housing’ as a valid answer, and so the notion that ‘nobody wants this’ becomes circular. Anybody who wants it isn’t really part of the community.”
The IRS has published a second open source repository (Direct File was the first). Kudos to the team continuing the work. github.com/IRS-Public/f...
No, keep posting! 💀