Standards help people do their jobs, manage risks, and improve our overall quality of life. However, the way we take in information and get things done is drastically changing, and so standards must change too.
The Innovation Incubator is a Standards Australia initiative to trial and test new ways to develop and deliver standards to end users.
What do users of standards want? Asking this question has led us to the concept of digital standards. This concept delivers more flexible, easy to use and intuitive content.
Another initiative we have been trialing is the idea of translating standards into visual concepts. Rather than reading dense technical text, the content is presented through images or videos.
With the visual standard, icons link to requirements and helpful information, to other standards, and to smart workflows or calculators.
The Incubator is not just exploring how we present our content, but how we develop it as well. Projects are underway where we have crowd-sourced experts as a means of opening up participation more widely.
It is early days for these concepts and many others, but we are excited to see where they could lead to make standards more accessible and of greater value to end users.