How Wired was guest edited by President Obama

Wired editor Scott Dadich writes about how the November issue was guest edited by President Barack Obama.

Dadich writes, “So last spring, when one of the president’s advisers reached out to me about working with WIRED, I pitched hard. Forget a Q&A. I wanted something more ambitious. That’s why I went to Washington to invite the President of the United States to guest-edit our November edition. This isn’t about politics. We aren’t trying to get anyone elected with this issue. We are instead celebrating a kindred spirit, someone who sees the potential of the future and isn’t afraid to head into it.

“The president and his team had page after page of ideas, and we realized that many of them focused on confronting big challenges—stopping climate change, exploring Mars, using personalized medicine to cure disease. They were the kind of ambitious ideas that you can see energizing a relatively young, hopeful optimist who’s about to be out of a job. We talked about the next big hurdles humanity faces and how we will get past them. These are the things that interest us too. One word seemed to capture the mutual mood: frontiers.

“As we got deeper into our discussions, we got more specific. I wanted WIRED to collaborate with the president to illustrate how the machinery of decisionmaking can lead to a better future. President Obama’s whole job, really, is to make a series of policy decisions with the goal of assembling a stronger country. As a designer I find that particularly compelling, because to me that’s exactly what design is: a series of decisions with intent. Making policy is designing culture.”

Read more here.