Blogging for the Government
At Sliced Bread Design, we’ve had an ongoing debate for the last year about whether to have a blog or not. I was saying it’s overdone, cliché, and does everyone really want to know what we’re thinking? Others at Sliced Bread said it would be a natural venue to share our viewpoint on design topics and issues in a lightweight way. OK, I do see how it could be useful as we do have well researched and thought out design views on lots of topics – especially those that we look into for a project, find very interesting, and then lose in the shuffle of everyday design work. Surely others would be interested as we were when the topic was timely for us.
But, it didn’t happen. Those who were more enthusiastic were busy with client work. When I had extra time, the little voice in me who still said it was a little bit lame would win out.
But recently I was won over to the blog side and we finally made some time to start it up. On the very day I was going to write my first entry, I had a flight out of San Jose Airport. I’d just gone through security, has wrestled my 19 month old back into her extremely cute tiger pattern shoes, and was stuffing my laptop back into my bag while keeping my eye on my 3 year old who is playing with the security ropes, as I see this sticker shown in the picture here. Got feedback? What? Even the TSA has a blog? OK, now seeing that sticker made me feel like we are jumping on the band wagon with our blog, cause you know if the government is doing it, it’s pretty old school. I bravely took a picture of as the TSA and police looked on. A very quick picture as I was a little nervous about doing it, and also the TSA guy was now pointing out to me that my toddler is climbing on a chair and it’s making him nervous (actually, he was really nice and helpful overall). So, I checked out the TSA blog today, and it is actually pretty good. They have a picture of some recent shoe bombs, and explain why they still make us take our shoes off, which did make me feel better about the foot gymnastics at the x-ray machine. So, let’s give this blog thing a try. Hopefully we’ll be at least as informative about design issues as the government is about security, or maybe a little bit more.
