“No, I won’t shut up about design.” A memoir from my military service.
I consider myself a creative and playful person. Concepts like design thinking and user-centred design feed my soul.
I blame this on my upbringing in Los Angeles, where music, art, film, theatre, and dance all collided in truly enriching ways. It also helped that I landed in a communications role in the U.S. Air Force, which was entirely focused on engaging different audiences (though it often fell short of that).
Fast forward to today — After moving from California to Texas and then serving in the U.S. military and working in the defence industry for 10 years now, I’ve witnessed a gut-wrenching absence of experiential, experimental, and iterative ways of thinking, communicating, and problem solving.
So, in this blog, I’m exploring what this looks like in the context of my time in the U.S. Air Force and a glaring gap I’ve witnessed — a neglect of design as a discipline and, specifically, a user-centred approach to developing servicemember-oriented digital services.
Reconnecting With My Roots
I was re-acquainted with the ‘artsy’ part of myself while working in the U.S. Air Force (USAF) innovation unit AFWERX back in 2019. And this is coming from a then-military photojournalist — something that requires creativity, but fell too squarely in “public relations land” to feel like it had a real impact.
But AFWERX, well, they came out strong with distinctive branding and a portfolio of projects ranging from a decentralised network of innovation units called Spark to design challenges pulling in diverse stakeholders to solve problems.
It was entirely outside my conception of what a military organisation could be.
Imagine going from sitting in a overwhelmingly beige office or shop for 8–12 hours a day, checking boxes and doing what you’re told, to sitting in a colourful room with modular furniture and people of every rank, calling them by their first names, and openly sharing your personal ideas. This provides people with what Arjun Appadurai calls the ‘Capacity to Aspire,’ a concept I learned from lecture with Dr. Lesley Ann Noel on emancipatory design.
While it seems this approach has since gone by the wayside in favour of a limited (and arguably regressive) tech- and acquisition-oriented approach as it becomes absorbed by the larger bureaucracy, I saw and experienced the transformative power this had on people like me — demoralised enlisted personnel who had their sense of autonomy and purpose slowly and methodologically chipped away at them during their service.
And how did that happen? Oftentimes in ways you wouldn’t expect. It wasn’t simply a matter of a leader doing their people wrong (though that happened plenty too).
More often than not, it came in the form of a systemic reinforcing of behaviours that, when broken down to their basic parts, said simply, matter-of-factly, and with a hint of indifference:
“Your experience doesn’t matter.”
The Great Stairway of Death
Take, for instance, a web app called the Air Force Fitness Management System II (AFFMS II). For at lease two years, Airmen braved the ‘Great Stairway of Death’—a navigation menu in the app in order to save and send fitness scores via email for promotions, awards, and assignments. Memes galore circled reddit — everything from Mario hopping down the stairs to joking that Airman have heads steady enough to be a surgeon.
It wasn’t until my submission to fix it was selected in a “Saving Airmen Time” crowdsourcing campaign in 2021 that is was formally addressed.
And though BESPIN (Business Enterprise Systems Product INnovation) and a company called Skylight designed and built a new web app, the subsequent delivery and maintenance of the newly-deemd “myFitness” is drawing another round of criticisms likely due to challenges like evolving stakeholder (not user) needs and the continuing adherence to a thematically-organised tech stack common in governments.
(Hmu if you have a few pieces of the AFFMS II→myFitness puzzle. It would be crazy fun to explore further.)
Technology Isn’t the Answer — People Are
While we could have a conversation about how to technologically get from A to B with issues like the AFFMS II, that misses what’s arguably the most fundamental aspect of all of this: The people these capabilities are serving.
Given the current state, it begs the question: What kind of impact does the dismissal of a servicemember’s experience have on their soul?
It may sound dramatic, but think about it. You join what some view as among the most purpose-driven out there [+ insert le ol’ blank check reference here], come to find out you likely have what David Graeber calls a ‘Bullshit Job’ (aka a nonner in Air Force speak) where an obscene amount of your time is spent staring into the nefarious depths of a loading NIPR login or Outlook screen.
And this isn’t unique to the U.S. Air Force or even the Department of Defense. It extends beyond governments as well, though there are unique challenges these entities face due to the role they play in society and the (unironic) beauty of their bureaucratic structures that is typically the scapegoat for lagging improvement.
That leads us to the exploration of what a ‘Digital Government’ actually looks like in practice.
Digi-Gov
As David Eaves repeatedly says in our Digital Transformation module, the term ‘Digital Government’ sets a false pretence. We’re in the digital age and, according to Carlotta Perez, have been experiencing the Information and Communications Technology (ICT) revolution for more than 50 years since the announcement of the Intel microprocessor in 1971.
Governments are now inherently digital, as is every other institution, because that’s the world we live in. Now, it’s just a matter of how they will operate dynamically within this reality and live up to their potential for delivering needed services to citizens and civil servants alike, fit with agile stability, entrepreneurial characteristics, and all.
This will only occur if user needs are central to any digital transformation efforts. Not by allowing stakeholder demands to lead to scope and data creep, not as a replica of existing org charts, and definitely not by justifying crappy services for fear of operational department changes.
While user-centred design presents its own limitations and shouldn’t be treated as an end-all, be-all solution, this is a goalpost worth setting an agency’s sights on.
TL:DR — Emphasise user experience and give us “artsy” folks some leeway to re-create government services. The benefits you seek will will follow.
Fin
