National Design Studio: Airbnb founder becomes Trump advisor
Instead of DOGE: The National Design Studio is to bring efficiency to the website design of US federal agencies.
Joe Gebbia is one of the founders of Airbnb and is now an investor and a kind of consultant for start-ups in Silicon Valley. Now he is to assist Donald Trump and head the newly created National Design Studio. Gebbia has a degree in graphic design.
Gebbia's official title will be Chief Design Officer of the United States of America. He announced this at X. According to Gebbia, his new task is to design the government's services in such a way that their use feels as intuitive as that of Apple's App Store, for example. Of course, this is also about efficiency. The project should benefit all Americans and make their lives less complicated. "I will do my best to make the USA the most beautiful, user-friendly country in the digital world." The X post also includes a job posting of sorts. Anyone who is interested should get in touch. There is already a National Design Studio homepage.
Standardized design language for US websites
The National Design Studio already has a fixed end date when it is founded: in three years' time, it should be finished and the work completed. As usual , the foundation is based on a decree. It is intended to promote the "America by Design" initiative. Basically, it is a slimmed-down version of the Department of Government Efficiency – DOGE. This had been led by Elon Musk until the two billionaires Trump and Musk came to blows in May of this year.
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Both digital and physical areas of federal agencies are to be redesigned. Standardized designs are to be used to reduce duplicate design costs, for example. There is already a United States Web Design System, but it is apparently outdated and is not used everywhere. There is nothing comparable in Germany, where every city and municipality operates its own website. Nothing is standardized.
According to the decree, there are around 26.000 federal agency websites in the USA. "Only 6 percent of US federal agency websites are rated as 'good' in terms of mobile performance," it also states.
Gebbia recently joined the DOGE team, is on the board of Tesla and is otherwise quite active. Forbes puts his fortune at more than eight billion US dollars.
(emw)
