Issue 33: Design

Featured Response: Sol Sender || Strategist, VSA Partners

Sol Sender

Designers of all ages and disciplines have been inspired by the President-elect’s campaign and victory and are motivated to bring the power of design to bear on the challenges facing our country. Information graphics and citizen interfaces (voting machines, tax forms, government websites) are areas of potential, and needed, impact. Already, the relationship between the government and the (technologically literate) citizenship is undergoing a profound shift; this will be a powerful legacy of the incoming administration and should contribute to sustaining our position as the global leader in information technology and user interface innovation.

The designs of products and systems, however, present even more urgent challenges. How, for example, will financial derivative structures or the healthcare system be redesigned? How will the world’s energy and natural resources problems be solved? How can we design regulations that harness the power of the free market while protecting the well-being of the broadest possible global constituency? What about our school systems?

The principles of design can transcend graphic communications, user interface, industrial design and architecture. Good design is also the design of the good: clear, efficient, accessible; usable, sustainable, elegant; inventive; beautiful. Across all disciplines, design has the power to make the world more intelligible–easier to navigate, more inviting and engaging, more relevant and more meaningful.

Might we be inaugurating an era of better design? Many of us believe it possible. Many of us believe that design principles are at the core of hope and real change: a better designed world for every American; a better designed America for the world.

Sol Sender is the former president and creative director of Sender LLC - designers of the Obama’08 logo.

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# 12: Health Care

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# 29: Space

Featured Response: Jeff Foust || The Space Review

# 13: National Defense

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# 2: Transportation

Featured Response: Vicki Northrup || TH!NK North America

Inaugural Insight

  • The inauguration for the first U.S. president, George Washington, was held on April 30, 1789 in New York City.
  • Should January 20 be a Sunday, the President is usually administered the oath of office in a private ceremony on that day, followed by a public ceremony the following day.
  • Immediately following the oath, the bands play four ruffles and flourishes and "Hail to the Chief", followed by a 21-gun salute from howitzers of the Presidential Salute Battery.
  • The inaugural celebrations usually last ten days, from five days before the inauguration to five days after.
  • Since Thomas Jefferson's second inaugural on March 4, 1805, it has become tradition for the president to parade down Pennsylvania Avenue from the Capitol to the White House.
  • According to tradition, in the first inaugural, President Washington added the words "so help me God" when reciting the oath, although there is no contemporary evidence of this.
  • In 1977, Jimmy Carter started a new tradition by walking from the Capitol to the White House, although subsequent presidents have only walked part of the way for security reasons.
  • The War of 1812 and World War II forced two swearing-ins to be held at other locations in Washington, D.C.
  • The new President assumes power at noon on January 20th, regardless of whether or not he has actually taken the oath of office.
  • There is no requirement that any book, or in particular a book of sacred text, be used to administer the oath, and none is mentioned in the Constitution.

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