The more I’ve thought about Citizen Experience — with its goal of reconsidering and improving the experience citizens have when they interact with government — the more I find myself coming back to the same thought: we really need a list of all those points of interaction. This would include everywhere that public institutions and […]
For the last year or so, my efforts at work have been focused primarily on trying to improve the user experience for visitors to GAO.gov. We’ve undertaken a usability testing process and incorporated new, sound analytics into our decisionmaking. On every web project, we are in the room to ask what each new proposed element […]
Back in November I saw a post on Google+ speculating about whether a quilt stitched to include a QR code would make a nice wedding gift. Weddings aside, immediately I knew this was a must-have item for my daughter Rose, who at that point was still a few weeks away from being born. I hadn’t […]
…or, since it’s NYC, Subway Symphony? Either way, a very cool representation of a public transit system through color, motion, and music. Conductor: www.mta.me from Alexander Chen on Vimeo. Conductor (2011) by Alexander Chen. Video capture. View live at: mta.me Conductor turns the New York subway system into an interactive string instrument. Using the MTA’s […]
I have had a pretty amazing two weeks. On December 8th, my wife gave birth to our daughter, Rose, and ever since we have all been home together getting to know our new family. I’m lucky to have a job with a leave policy that has allowed me to take this time without too much […]
The news today that the world population has hit 7 billion is challenging to process. NPR.org makes it more intelligible with this video showing how that population has changed over time in different regions of the world. I love visualizations like this, that take something so mind-bendingly complex and make it so simple and […]
I’m taking a thought-provoking class at the USDA grad school called “Information Architecture and the User Experience.” We meet on Wednesday nights and talk, basically, about how information is organized. Everyone has had experiences where we go to a website and after a few minutes of clicking around in search of whatever brought us there […]
As part of my work, I helped develop the following animation depicting changes to the global carbon cycle over time. This accompanied a GAO technical assessment on geoengineering — research and techniques focused on altering the Earth’s climate to help alleviate the effects of global climate change. I have embedded the video version below; the […]
A crew from a new National Geographic TV series built a house and tied giant helium balloons to it until it flew away. Incredulity?
For the last few weeks, our dog Wingo has been spending an inordinate amount of time in our backyard, and coming home inexplicably dirty. I finally followed him out there one night to discover that he had found a way through our fence and into the neighbor’s yard — which, conveniently, has a giant hole […]