On Election Day (Tuesday!), please bring a camera with you to your polling place and take some pictures of American democracy in action. Then submit your photos to the ingenious Polling Place Photo Project, which will document every one of America’s election locations through good old fashioned web-based citizen journalism.

I can’t even begin to scratch the surface of the kinds of fascinating, inspiring, and troubling things this project will potentially reveal about America’s crazy democratic process, both the good and the bad: the rogues gallery of different kinds of voting methods and machines, the long confusing lines, the aggressive party electioneers, the intimidating highway patrolmen, the hard-to-find locations… and the dedicated voters waiting as long as it takes to vote, the helpful volunteers managing the process — maybe we’ll even see some well-designed signage. Not to mention the pride in seeing the faces of American voters doing what is admittedly an inconvenient but ultimately rewarding civic obligation. I really look forward to seeing the results of this project.

To learn more, please visit the project’s official site, which has lots of helpful information about how to legally photograph your polling place and how to submit your images to the project’s web site.

Oh, and while you’re hanging around your polling place taking photographs, you should vote. Probably for a Democrat. Unless you live in Vermont’s Windham-2, in which case you should vote Progressive. Thank you!

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It seems laughably obvious that this supposedly cutting-edge voting device will feel positively ancient in only a couple of years. It already looks like a cheap peice of crap to me, hardly something worthy of being integral to the American democratic process. And believe it or not, this photo was taken in 2004 — even though it looks a lot more like it’s from 1994 (think Windows 3.1).

In 2004, Behavior worked on a web site for the Smithsonian Museum of American History’s special exhibition Vote: The Machinery of Democracy. The exhibition focused on America’s “voting patchwork”, the broad range of voting technologies used state by state, county by county. It was an enlightening experience working on the project, and I encourage you to visit the site to learn about how we got to where we are now.

The current range of voting technologies in use today includes:

• Paper Ballots
• Gear-and-Lever Voting Machines
• Punch Cards
• Optical Scan Ballots and Readers
• Direct-Recording Electronic Ballots

It’s widely assumed that the most modern technology available is obviously the best option — that is, that we should be using touch-screen direct-recording electronic voting machines. But maybe this isn’t the case — counterintuitively, perhaps an older technology is the best approach. MORE…

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WWBFD? Benjamin Franklin took for granted that part of his role as a technologist with access to mass media (he was, after all, a printer and publisher) was to make public arguments about his own political views. If he were around today, and I know that this isn’t an original thought, he’d almost certainly be a blogger. Ben Franklin is far and away my favorite “Founding Father”. BFF!

It’s almost cliche by now to talk about how the Internet has empowered regular people by giving them the tools to reach a broader audience than was possible in ye olde tymes, particularly in the realm of politics. I am still surprised, however, that so few popular bloggers bother to express their political thoughts online.

I write about politics here fairly often, for two reasons.

The first reason is self-centered: Writing about politics is personally clarifying and cathartic. It allows me to take my jumbled thoughts and emotions regarding what I read in the news and form them into a concrete opinion, which in turn gives me a sense of clarity about my views, forcing me to attempt to answer the not-so-obvious questions. It also simply lets me rant and get things off my chest (something that can probably be said about almost every blog post ever written by anyone, political or not).

The second reason is outwardly-focused, and perhaps a little idealistic: I want to use my voice to actually effect change in the world, to have some impact on the thoughts and opinions of other people by inspiring them to say and do things knowing that there are other people who think the same way. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t imagine that my little blog posts will reach the desks of important politicians and inspire them to change their positions on issues I care about. Nor do I think that my scintillating political writing will inspire millions of people and sway elections. I’m not delusional.

But I do think I can have a more modest kind of impact among the hundreds of people who read graphpaper.com regularly: By publicly articulating my opinions, I hope to (a) give some degree of moral support and maybe even a little boost of courage to others who share that opinion, and (b) provide the rhetoric and logical arguments to help them clarify their ideas and even to share them with other citizens via discussion or even debate.

You see, I believe that one of the main reasons politics is so messed up in America today is because most of us are afraid to discuss politics in public. We’re afraid of talking about it with our friends, coworkers, and families. And because we don’t discuss it, we don’t think about it and we don’t take action. And because of this lack of debate, bad stuff happens.

For example, the reason why the Iraq War happened in the first place, and the reason why it was allowed to be managed so incompetantly for so long, was in some part because the taboo against talking about politics prevented people from saying out loud, or even articulating internally to themselves, what they suspected in their hearts: that Bush’s vision for success in Iraq was (at best) a shot-in-the-dark fantasy. Those who might have opposed the war in the first place looked out among their friends and across America for voices of opposition and heard almost nothing, primarily because not enough people were taking the simplest of all political actions, talking.

I think it’s every American’s duty to make their political opinions known to their friends and peers, and to engage in political discussions, whether in the form of civil debate or plain old righteous argument, with their closest associates. I think this responsibility extends particularly to those of us with above average voices, that is, to those of us who blog.

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Democrats (and Republicans with guts and/or brains) should draft a new law that makes an exception to the military’s “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” policy for gay soldiers who function as translators and who work in certain other intelligence-related roles. Even though the Republican leadership is perfectly happy having known-to-be-gay representatives in senior House leadership positions and charged with protecting America’s children from predators, they still don’t think they belong in our armed forces helping translate terrorist intercepts. It’s both ludicrous and tragic that we’re allowing homophobia to gut our counterterrorism capabilities.

It’s idiocy to want to restrict gays from combat roles in the military, of course, but it’s a thousand times more idiotic to bar them from desk jobs where the bullshit “unit cohesion” excuse doesn’t even hold water. Many Americans who may not actually be raging homophobes, including many Democrats right up to Bill Clinton, still support “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” out of some kind of twisted tolerance for the cultural backwardness they think typifies the American soldier. But even they shouldn’t be able to reconcile that stance with the detrimental effect the policy is taking on our counterterrorism and intelligence capabilities.

Because of the primacy of the War On Terror over All Other Issues, legislation making an exception for gay translators would be hard to oppose by many would-be tolerant members of Congress, and it would be hard for Bush to veto. Of course, now that the Republican House leadership has been exposed as being secretly tolerant of gays even while they are publicly bigoted against them, maybe the GOP will once again feel obliged to pander to their base by acting just a little more bigoted than they actually are. That would be sad.

I fear that the biggest obstacle to such a bill may well be Democrats who think that it doesn’t go far enough, who won’t settle for chipping away at injustice, fighting for the civil rights of some soldiers while leaving others out to dry. Noble minded, but strategically foolish. Sigh.

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(This is Part 6, the final part of this series. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, Part 4, and Part 5.)

Despite my calls for increased class consciousness, I actually think that class may be less and less important as American culture evolves and as class exploration becomes more fluid and amorphous.

Let’s look at New York’s legendary Greek-motif coffee cups. The class fluidity of this design is striking: The original design inspiration is ancient Greece, where the class system made you either a citizen or a slave. In the 18th through early 20th centuries, Greek themes became a key marker of the highest classes in the form of neoclassicism. Greek immigration to NYC in the early to mid 20th century led to the advent of the working-class Greek diner: the Greek-motif coffee cup emerges. Since the 1960’s, the design has proliferated in many varieties around New York’s diners, delis, and coffee shops. It has become an esoteric but endearing symbol of New York City, beloved by all New York coffee drinkers regardless of class. And now, super-cool earthenware replicas are available at the MoMA Design Store for $14 each.

The Flattening of Class

Although income disparities in the USA are growing more stark and economic mobility is lower than it has been in decades, class-based cultural differences are indeed breaking down. People with lower-class roots have greater access than ever to traditionally upper-class products and pursuits. And the upper classes are attracted to the cultural ideas and products from below, as well. As Steve Bryant commented in a previous post, “the rise of mass media has made fluency in low culture just as much an asset as your ability to navigate a conversation about Wittgenstein”. MORE…

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(This is Part 5. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3a, and Part 4)

Go get ‘em Mom: patiencemerriman.com

I recently designed a web site for my mother, who is running for the Vermont state legislature (I’m so proud of her!). Vermont is a small, largely rural state, and there are a lot of regular working class folks there who like many Americans have to struggle to get by. And despite its ultra-liberal reputation, it’s actually a fairly conservative and traditional place in most parts. You actually won’t find a lot of latte-drinking, sushi-eating elites in Vermont, in particular where my Mom lives.

So when Mom asked me to design her site, she said “don’t make it too fancy”. It couldn’t look like some fancy New York City hipster boutique web site that cost thousands of dollars to build. Candidates in Vermont literally have a spending cap of $2000 for their entire campaigns, so although my work was pro-bono I needed to keep the design simple and economical.

What’s more, my mother hates Helvetica!

So I tried to make it nice but not hip or slick. I think the result is nice enough that I’m happy to link to it here on my site and show it to all my elite snobby designer friends, but honestly I had a hard time finding a balance between fancy and not-fancy. I actually think I am pretty bad at non-fancy design!

Left, Right, High, and Low

I’d like to see what more-skilled and elite designers would do with a similar challenge, where something real and important is at stake and appropriateness to the audience is critical.

A handy example is Andy Rutledge’s unsolicited redesign for the White House web site. While excellent and elegant design-wise, I think it is entirely wrong for the typical Bush voter, or for that matter to the typical American. I presume Andy to be sympathetic to the Administration’s political objectives, but his design sensibility does not map to what I think Karl Rove thinks President Bush’s “base” would prefer. The current White House site is anti-slick and anti-elitist by choice. Andy’s White House site design, on the other hand, looks like something a latte-drinking, sushi-eating, President Gore would have wanted — and he would have been just as wrong as I think Andy is.

One look at President Clinton’s White House site from 2000 (love that Wayback machine!), complete with two-fisted animated GIF American flags, shows that Clinton’s web team, like Bush’s, thought that a lowbrow design was the best approach.

Both parties have upper-class elites among their target voters and supporters, of course, but these supporters are not reached by web sites and banners — they get embossed letters with elegant typography inviting them to $1,000-a-plate dinners. The masses of working-class and middle-class supporters in each party’s “base”, however, are the targets of politicial web sites, and the design language used to communicate and connect with them is mission-critical.

Next: Class and Web Design, Part 6: Breaking The Class Barrier

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(This is Part 4. Please check out Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 3a)

Earlier, I talked about the markers of class that surround us every day. A person’s cultural immersion in a narrow range of class markers can create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, a vicious circle of desire: Poor people can’t afford expensive products, so manufacturers skimp on design, resulting on lower-quality and perhaps uglier products, conditioning the lower classes to accept bad design as normal even to the point of considering the markers of ugly design as appropriate and desirable to them.

Victor Lombardi reminds us that eBay is a kind of online flea market, so he asks: isn’t it appropriate that the design of eBay’s web site would have a similar vibe, and a similar level of design sophistication, of a roadside flea market?

In other words, if the bargain-basement is your intended milieu, it’s almost impossible, and quite possibly bad business, to attempt to escape it with a boutique design sensibility. MORE…

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What’s wrong with this picture?

(This is Part 3a. Please check out Part 1 , Part 2, and Part 3)

There’s a fascinating debate at Subtraction about the design of the new New York Post web site, between the AIGA’s Liz Danzico and the New York Times‘ (and Subtraction’s) Khoi Vinh. The discussion, I think, dances around class issues all over the place as Khoi and Liz speculate about what is and is not appropriate to what they think of as the typical New York Post reader.

I think class totally comes into play in this conversation. The Post and the Times are, in fact, classic and quintessential class markers. In fact, class is probably the easiest and most obvious way of differentiating the two papers overall (besides the tabloid/broadsheet format). The Times is a higher class product in nearly every way, from the reading level to the products advertised to the people featured in the “Vows” section.

Yes, there is a lot of crossover between the papers’ readerships, and for sports and gossip (and even occasionally local investigative journalism) the Post may pick up some of the Times‘ demographic. But sports and gossip are class markers that increasingly bleed across the class spectrum. Plus, is there no better indicator of the Times‘ class pretention that they still deliberately avoid in-depth sports coverage, salacious celebrity gossip, and comic strips? MORE…

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(This is Part 3. Please check out Part 1 and Part 2)

Does the “AS SEEN ON TV” badge tell you that a product is good? Or does it have the opposite effect on you? My guess is that, if you’re anything like me, the little red badge indicates “cheap crap” to you. But to millions of people it is a badge of quality — it tells them that the product is mainstream and well-known.

Why the difference? How can a little red badge radically alter the perceived credibility of a product? Whatever the answer is, you can bet that it correlates pretty closely with class. In fact, I contend that class plays some kind of role in just about every aspect of a product’s existence, from its business strategy to how it’s marketed and everything in between.

Before I go any further, however, I want to be clear that I’m not saying anything about this is right or wrong. I’m just saying that is the way things are, and that we should be talking about how much class can or cannot be extracted from the design equation. MORE…

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Clinton on Fox. Notice the footnote: If Clinton hadn’t done this interview, Richard Clarke’s role in fighting terror (and Bush’s role in ending Clarke’s role) would drift further away from the Fox viewer’s consciousness.

I read a post today at Sean Coon’s connecting*the*dots blog entitlted “and keep your enemies closer“, and I thought at first it was going to be about how progressives and liberals shouldn’t be afraid to get up close and personal with conservatives, that in fact it may be to our advantage to keep them close by and engaged. Specifically I was thinking about how Democrats are apparently afraid to appear on Fox News, and about how stupid that strategy is.

Bill Clinton was on Fox News Sunday today, in an interview with Chris Wallace. Wallace asked a series of questions that, in effect, accused the Clinton Administration of ignoring Al Qaeda. Wallace probably thought that Clinton, like many other Democrats, would hem and haw and foolishly attempt to actually answer his “when did you stop beating your wife”-type questions instead of coming back and attacking the question by responding with facts that undermine the question itself.

Bubba wasn’t having any of that. MORE…

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