Public Strategist

Producing consumption and consuming production, prousage and co-production in the context of social policy.

The Freakonomics blog reports: Dr. Gretchen Berland, an assistant professor at the Yale University School of Medicine and former documentary filmmaker, writes in the New England Journal of Medicine of an extraordinary experiment she has conducted over the past 10 years. It involved giving videocameras to people in wheelchairs, and asking them to document their [...]

Substituting telephones for paper has gone quite a long way for incoming customer contact.  There are many services where it is possible – and often easier – to ring up than to write or to go there, wherever ‘there’ might be. Substituting phones for outgoing contact is much less advanced.  Buff envelopes remain the characteristic [...]

I need to get a tax disc.  In order to be allowed to get a tax disc, I need to get an MoT certificate.  That’s simple – the motoring bit of Directgov has a well-deserved reputation for being one of the most useful areas of the site. Step 1 – Look for MoT information – [...]

Jane Galt wants to buy a car.  So she looks at a website, and doesn’t find the one piece of information she most wanted – and indeed concludes that that information is not there to be found: This is what happens when the commercial team runs roughshod over editorial. The general rule about a website [...]

A few days ago, I was reading a book about how ideas stick.  What happened next shows just how sticky they can be. This is the passage from the book: A few years back, a group of hospital administrators asked the design firm IDEO to help improve the hospital’s workflow.  The team at IDEO knew [...]

Having recently considered that new-fangled invention, the book, we can now turn our attention to the yet newer-fangled gadget the telephone – and not just any telephone, but, gasp, the telephone with a dial, no less. This is the instruction video, 1927 style, overcoming some major challenges – how do you get across the difference [...]

Robert Scoble has two posts up following a conversation he had with Tom Conrad, now of Pandora, but more pertinently, formerly of Apple. In the first, he tells an Apple joke: If it’s 999 engineers who say "yes" to an idea vs. one who says "no" they’d score it as a tie and kill the [...]

We tend to have two contradictory assumptions about new channels – particularly online channels.  On one hand, they are the self-evident future, mores straightforward in every respect than the cumbersome, time-consuming and bureaucratic processes they will replace – and so wholly unsurprisingly, our customers will seize on the new opportunities just as soon as we [...]

From Bruce Scheier Back in the 1980s, Yosemite National Park was having a serious problem with bears: They would wander into campgrounds and break into the garbage bins. This put both bears and people at risk. So the Park Service started installing armored garbage cans that were tricky to open — you had to swing [...]