Recently in Society Category

While many Americans scramble to get their income tax returns ready to send into Uncle Sam tomorrow, I'm thinking about why this has to be such an unpleasant experience.

I filed my taxes back at the beginning of February the day I got my W2. I have one job. I don't itemize. I don't own a home. And I'm not alone.

Tens of millions of Americans files their taxes without adding any information that the government doesn't already have from their employers.

Yale Law Professor Ian Ayres wants you to think about it like your relationship with the credit card company. Visa or Mastercard don't expect you to keep your receipts and send in a check hoping that you get it right. Instead, Visa sends you a bill telling what you owe or if you have a credit. Why can't income tax be this simple?

It can. In California they piloted a program called Ready Return in 2004 and '05. The program sent out pre-filled tax forms to ten thousand taxpayers who merely needed to sign their name or make small adjustments.

Sadly, they didn't run the program this year because of heavy lobbying by Intuit but feedback from participants was so good that it will make an expanded comeback in 2007.

Last Saturday, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards proposed a similar program at the federal level. His "Form 1" would be sent to Americans like me who just fill out the basics and send it back. Instead I would get form that already has all the information filled out correctly. This is particularly important for the one out of four eligible families who miss out on the Earned Income Tax Credit.

Moreover, it would save average Americans the cost of seeing a tax preparer and would open up opportunities for simple online filing directly with the IRS.

And this is where I get really interested. This kind of solution is the perfect application of design thinking to a seemingly intractable problem.

I am a professional designer who has a political ideology that hold that the government should provide helpful services to people, it should be in the business of making our lives easier.

Taxation is an example of an interaction between us and the state that almost ends badly. I think this has a great deal to do with the low opinion people hold of our government.

In the United Kingdom, the UK Design Council has worked with the National Health Service to solve exactly this problem: how do you take unwieldy bureaucracies and make them pleasant to deal with? Better yet, how do you make them genuinely helpful?

You do it by thinking like a designer. It might seem pie in the sky but why can't going to the DMV be as streamlined and simple as going to Starbucks?

But let's stick to the issue at hand: taxes. What California and John Edwards have struck on is what we designers call low-hanging fruit.

• The information required to send out a RedyReturn or a Form1 already exists at the IRS. Even better, the IRS has enough information to send a pre-filled state form as well.
• The IRS already prints and mails out forms so you merely need to tweak that workflow to adapt to the new form.
• This is an opportunity to bring online filing back in house at the IRS. The outsourced FreeFile program doesn't make anything easier than a web-based Form1 would. Moreover, FreeFile opens up citizens to being duped by scammers claiming to participate in the federal program.

Implementing this project at the IRS would be a quick win both with huge returns for the people who would benefit directly and a more subtle benefit in an improved reputation for the IRS.

As you take your form to the post office tomorrow think about why the system is set up the way it is and how it could be made better without too much work. As designers, this is what we can give back to society.

A few months ago I posted a del.icio.us link to the Norwegian Wikipedia entry on Friday. In addition to all the helpful information about the last day of the five day workweek is a little information is a photograph of a typical Shabbat dinner. That photograph of Erica, Julie, Rob, and my dad enjoying a Shabbat dinner in our D.C. apartment got to Wikipedia by way of a search for Creative Commons material. The reproduction of this photo is possible because I, like an increasing number of media creators, mark my productions with the appropriate permission.

All of my flickr photos, for example, are marked with the Attribution-ShareAlike license provided by Creative Commons. This tells anyone who comes across my images that they may do whatever they like with them as long as they attribute the work to me and allow others to use the image with the same restrictions.

This might sounds like a silly thing to do with my flickr pictures. Most of them, after all, are of places I've been and my friends. But because I apply this license to them. Because I choose to allow the community to do with my images what they like as long I get credit, I get the pleasure of running across my pictures in the strangest places. I've even gotten a few e-mails asking if people can use an image in a small publication or on a CD cover and I always say yes.

Next time you log into flickr, change your default setting from copyright to the Creative Commons license of your choice. You'll be surprised to see who likes your photos.

Here are some more places I've discovered my images in the wild:

• Londonist Peace Mom
• Dingoes Attack A day without immigrants
• Made You Look Stale, Stale, Stale Corporate Image
• field notes We are workers, not criminals
• ADDED DCist It's D.C. Pride Week! All Experimentation Will Be Forgiven

Every day I get an e-mail from the Oxford English Dictionary with their word of the day. Today's, oddly enough, is 999. What, I asked myself, does 999 mean? Apparently, 999 is the emergency services telephone number for the United Kingdom and a number of other countries. Upon further investigation I discovered that all over the world there are a number of different three-digit emergency services codes.

Upon reflection, this is obvious. I mean, not everyone speaks English so why should everyone dial 911 when their house is on fire. To remedy my own ignorance and to provide a quick reference here is a simple list of emergency services numbers around the world.

Just over halfway into a jampacked evening Julie and I realized that we just weren't going to make it to the theater in time for opening night of The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy. We had already taken in the Tiger unveiling at the Apple store, eaten dinner, and met some friends for a birthday happy hour.

It was time to hail a taxi.

Twenty years ago, all hell broke loose in the Soviet Ballistic Missile Early Warning System control room. The computers showed incoming nuclear missiles and one man had to decide whether to launch a retaliatory strike.

His instructions were clear, if he saw signs from the satellite system that the United States had launched missiles against the Soviet Union he was to push the "START" button and initiate a counter-strike.

He waited and no missiles came. It had been a computer glitch.

Just past midnight on September 26, 1983, Stanislav Petrov saved the world. What did you do today?

"[Rep. Patrick] Mahoney said the fact that Schiavo has survived nearly 10 days since the removal of the tube that has supplied her with nutrition and water indicates that she wants to appear before the House Government Reform Committee" according to CNN.

On November 17, 1988, Charles DeLay and his brother Jerry were in a tragic accident while tinkering with a backyard tram. Charles was thrown head-first into a tree.

As he tried to speak on the way to the hospital nothing coherent came out. "He wasn't making any sense; it was mainly just cuss words," recalled his wife Maxine. His medical records show that he arrived at the hospital with multiple broken ribs and brain hemorrhaging.

Over the next 27 days his condition deteriorated and the family decided that they didn't want their patriarch to "be a vegetable." They prayed and together with the agreement of her son, The Honorable Tom DeLay, Maxine decided to allow her husband to die.

An army of pollsters have fanned our across America to gauge the pulse of the nation on the latest issue of the day. Phones are ringing and average Joe is sharing his two cents about what should happen to Terri Schiavo's feeding tube.

What happens to the numbers from these phone calls can have an important impact on how people see this important issue. Because of this simple fact, new organizations have an obligations to present poll results in their proper context.

Today, CNN got it horribly wrong.

We have known about George W. Bush's special love of "faith-based" perspectives for some time. Recent revelations about Diana Schaub, a Loyola College professor and advisor to President Bush, published in the Baltimore Sun take the role of "faith" in making policy to new heights.

It turns out that Schaub's strong opposition to cloning and embryonic stem cell research was formed watching Star Trek.

Earlier today, President George W. Bush named John Negroponte as the first Director of Intelligence for the United States. Just this morning, news outlets were abuzz with talk about the unusually high number of vacant appointee positions in the administration.

Bush's selection of Negroponte mutes much of this criticism but opens up the can of worms that is Negroponte's history.