Co-creation, conversation, and complexity: The three facets of civic design
Originally published on Medium on NOV 29, 2021
Shifting perspectives in government takes a long time, and it’s often hard. As civic designers, we aim to deconstruct nebulous problems to create effective and efficient services and channels of communication. We try to change and challenge government structures to embody the bridge between people and government structures. This article describes what civic design means to me by defining the values and principles we celebrate at Innovation@MCG. Although, before you dive in, I’d have to establish that this experience is individualistic. Design in local government is not a monolith; on the contrary, it’s a gamut of methods, approaches, and stories. What I have here is a tiny peep into the work I’ve done in the past six months. And with that, you can read on.
Co-creating futures and spaces
Civic design goes beyond our traditional understanding of design because it’s not limited to a product or a service. Instead, it’s about bringing emotional intelligence and problem-solving together to tackle administrative burden, inequity, and complex social science issues. In addition, it focuses on the outcomes of and for our communities by activating institutional tools.
As design practitioners, we hold ourselves accountable to be mediators and facilitators, not siloed creators. I question my intent and values with each project, to create community and people-centered work by inviting others to be collaborators. A key intention of creating collaboration space is to decentralize the power structures my position gives me or institutions have set in place. Residents love to tell you what they feel. Still, I won’t do justice to my practice if I refuse to identify how powerless they feel accessing services. Hence, civic design is often about creating shared spaces with residents and public servants to design a future.
Learning from conversations
While a design practitioner in local government may transform and use different skills based on the need, the core part of their practice is investigating and understanding issues. In my projects at the Montgomery County Government, I’ve focused on understanding the over-arching issue of administrative burden, which may result in equity and emotional strain for employees. To know how administrative burden impacts people in our county government, I started with informal conversations with the intent of learning from their experience. I used artifacts such as journey maps to facilitate discussions to gain a birds-eye perspective of their underlying issues. Hearing from individuals with institutional expertise enables us to understand the pain points and opportunities without attaching assumptions to the problem.
Embracing complexity
As people, we are good at linking cause and effect and sometimes too hasty at that. When researchers establish their motive to embrace the chaos before making judgments, they understand and comprehend the series of actions that lead to systemic issues. Embracing complexity in my role meant adapting and growing with time to accommodate all perspectives while staying honest with our motivations. Hearing out nebulous conversations enables me to understand intricacies invisible to us, impacting how the partners collaborate on a particular project. So often, in local government projects, design practitioners are at the risk of feeling lost initially. When design practitioners create space to listen, we invite an incredible amount of qualitative information, which may be disorienting. Although, I love this part of the process because it enables me to hear conversations and identify intersections where I can, personally, add value. Furthermore, the benefit of embracing complexity helps us put our presumptions aside and work towards holistically understanding the problem. Because if we are being honest, we can’t solve everything, but defining challenges is a good start.