Democracy 2.0

mysociety created fixmystreet, a link between people and their councils which did actually fix my street (well, Deptford High Street which was a near impasse on my morning bike ride to work), and also theyworkforyou , which is a channel for the public to identify and contact their MPs and officials. And their code is open source. Nice chaps.



They’ve made dozens of simple tools in collaboration with councils and charities that work primarily through their transparency – they could publish which MPs reply to or ignore emails, who are the best and worst performing councils from the public’s perspective, which forces councils to act from a user-centred perspective.

With people taking such direct action to change their local environment, is this eroding democratic processes or empowering members of the public to overcome the UK's world-renowned bureaucracy? Is it right that the active minority should be the ones to shape their streets, parks and local amenities?

I believe that these tools are not undermining or bypassing democracy, but making the interface between politics and the public more dynamic and personal.


Electing a government and MP is a small part of a citizen's potential. Culturally, we are focused on the few big, general decisions and how they will affect everyone and not the small, myriad personal ones. A top-down operation can lack understanding of it's end users' needs - our everyday experiences can be much better affected with a ground-up approach. The majority of eligible people in the UK vote, but many people never contact their councils to say a streetlight's broken or to inquire what happened to the plans to clean up our local park or even to propose improvements.

Cultural issues aside, one thing keeping us from contacting our councils was the feeling of the hopelessness of bureaucracy. Now that the barriers are being removed to allow for a more fluid, user-friendly and frequent dialogue, we shall see with time whether the majority becomes more active, and how governments can utilise this vital feedback to inform more responsive, robust and relevant policies.

Future Flight at the Science Museum

This week I participated in a talk at the Science Museum entitled 'Future Flight'. Held at the Dana Centre, with three other speakers who were engineering luminaries from Manchester Met, Cambridge and Bauhaus Luftfahrt.

My talk covered the evolution of the design of airports and aeroplanes from a product-based and engineering-driven model, to an experience and service-based and user-driven model.



It described how with most airlines using similar technology (planes), the thing that differentiates them is the services they offer. This was then followed by a description of the complexities of designing experiences, particularly for such massive spaces such as airports and airplanes, which is seen when you take the needs, desires, abilities and mindsets of all the different passengers that will use them at the same time.

The brief introduction to the subject was rounded up with some details of the different methodologies that could be employed to research, inform and design such complex experiences such as working from the bottom up rather than the top down, placing the user at the heart of the design process.



Emotional journey mapping and the principles of co-designing with end users were used as examples of such methodologies, with quick case studies such as Engine's Connections Experience or T5 info zone included to illustrate.

The presentation stuck out from the other three who gave interesting insights into the future of aerodynamics, sustainability issues and how technology is falling behind in comparison to user demand and sheer numbers of people in the air and the environmental effects as a result. However, the marathon one-hour per speaker q & a session that followed was reassuringly passionate, as everyone there has had some good, bad, weird and wonderful experiences of flying, and it is precisely those human experiences that I am interested in.