Feb
2007
Green power.
I learned today about Peter Schweizer’s editorial in USA Today about Al Gore not using renewable energy sources to power his own home even though they’re available in the metropolitan markets where he resides, Washington, DC among them. To which my first thought was not oh, the hypocrisy, but, why the hell am I not using renewable energy sources to power my own home?
So in ten days, I will be—though not without some effort. From the Pepco site where I track my account online, I finally located information on green power two branded websites away—through the DC Public Service Commission and then through the ostensibly separate Pepco Energy Services site (although Pepco will still be my electricity provider, though I’ve switched service plans). If this isn’t part of an effort to prevent residential customers from choosing renewable energy sources, then this is classically bad web design.
The first place I looked on the first Pepco site (and the only one I knew at the time) was under ‘Safety & Conservation,’ which turned out to be useful information like a refresher course on turning the lights off when you’re not in a room where there’s abundant sunshine filtering through a window and why you shouldn’t execute electrical outlets with Super Soaker firing squads, but didn’t answer my inquiry. The answer was (still reasonably intuitively) located under the heading of ‘Choices & Rates.’ Then it got dicey.
Choose the state—fair enough, since different laws apply. My first inclination here was to rifle through the column of links that appeared below ‘District of Columbia,’ which were illuminating insofar as deciphering the bill I paid blindly in my monthly ritual, although in fact, the pertinent link to follow is in the ten-pixel tightly-leaded Arial content of the landing page, one that leads to the aforementioned DC Public Service Commission site, then to Pepco Energy Services. The latter site is nothing special—a perfunctory electronic brochure—but its failure is that it functions like an eCommerce site insofar as it uses terms like ‘Add to Cart’ and ‘Checkout’ but doesn’t visually cue the visitor (no global shopping cart link?) to expect the process when selecting their service options. I could go on, preaching how design can save the environment.
I watched An Unreasonable Man on Saturday night, met Ralph Nader, bought his book. And for as much as Democrats, liberals, and just an assortment of sane people have branded him the scapegoat for the horrors that have befallen American politics the past six years, consider that the official margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes, which was less than any candidate for any other party received—blame could just have easily been laid on the doorstep of Pat Buchanan. I’m not sure whether or not my mother blames Nader for the second Bush presidency, but when we discuss the 2004 election (which any Democrat should’ve won considering Bush’s miserable first term), it irks her that I don’t blame Karl Rove or swift boat veterans but web designers.
There’s no math on how much the growing internet-usage habits of Americans affect how they respond to politicians—I would know because I sought it out, and with contacts at the Pew Internet & American Life Project and FirstGov, attempted to parse it from pre-existing statistics. We came to no conclusions, but the circumstantial evidence is compelling. Not only is internet usage de rigeur, but broadband internet usage is becoming a norm as well—it’s not enough that it’s a phone call away, but it must be always available and always fast. And as it replaces television and print media as sources of news for the American electorate, who’s to say that an accessible and substantive issue-driven website for Gore in 2000 doesn’t pick up 538 indisputable votes in Florida? Again, I could go on, preaching how design can save the environment, prevent war, and save lives.
The New York Times ran Paula Scher’s graphical analysis of the two presidential campaign logos from 2004 that showed just how little analytical thinking was done by designers for the Kerry-Edwards campaign, and I wish I still had access to the two 2004 campaign sites to perform a similar dissection. Nevertheless, my first thought at the 2004 election results was not oh, Nader again—actually, it was cold, dread-driven escapism, spiked by one of the most surreal Irish drinking songs ever—but it tempered to, what the hell could each of us have done in 2000 and 2004 to have made sure George W. Bush would not be president?
For me, a better website is a start. Powering my dropped-ceiling condominium with renewable captured methane gas is something, too.
