Re-imagining the City of Austin’s website as physical space

Ever pondered what your city’s website would look like in a non-digital format, as a physical object? If you live in Austin, wonder no more!

For this year’s Digital Inclusion Week, the City’s Office of Design and Delivery put together an exhibit of all the portable document format (PDF) forms hosted on the city’s website, austintexas.gov. The installation, which displayed over 500 PDF forms, was only a fraction of the 6,566 PDF documents that currently exist on the city’s website.

The goal of the installation was to create awareness about the need to digitize services. Besides cutting down on paper, digitization (when done right) makes services more accessible. If you want to learn about other digitization efforts, and why they’re so important, check out the work done in Boston by Josh Gee. Or the work done at the federal level by the U.S. Digital Services.

Service access team members chat about all of the forms that exist on austintexas.gov

“So this is what the internet would look like in real life.”

- Installation attendee

Browsing forms from the Department of Development Services.

Two city employees identify and discuss their forms.

Peering through the forms.

A team member stands in front of rows of forms she helped to construct and arrange.

We’d love to hear back from you. Please leave your comments below or contact us at access@austintexas.gov.