What is Civic Design?
Words by Stevie Bal
This story is presented by Local Peoples.
Civic design focuses on discovering and delivering solutions that are shaped by the holistic experiences of everyone in a community who is affected by a public service.
“There are practical frameworks you can follow, but it’s also a mindset,” said Melbourne Design Week panellist and Service Design Lead Gabrielle Grist. “If you would like to create services that meet the needs of a community, you need to involve that community in the creation.”
Design is often mistaken for ‘how it looks’ but the NYC Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity says that design could be better described as ‘how it works’. For a program, product, policy or service to be effective, we need to look at its context, perceived value, processes, communications and physical environments.
Let’s take a look at what civic design is and how we can use it to create healthy, resilient communities.
Civic design is based on discovery
Think of civic design as a way to empower all the voices who may be affected by a public service. As Experimental Civics says, “it’s rare to have everyone at the table talking about what they want to see happen.”
Although every person who will be affected can’t be at the table, civic design aims to have everyone represented. In a panel discussion at Rosenfeld’s Civic Design 2021 Public Interest Designer Shahzmah Esmail shared, “The goal is to have teams that look more like the communities we serve to understand what the public needs and consider unintended consequences so that we have a better product in the end and better ways to serve people.”
Civic design goes beyond designing communications, products and services in the way it’s always been done. “It is not enough to streamline existing processes; what is needed is the discovery and invention of new modes of organising and action,” writes Carl DiSalvo and Christopher Le Dantec. “Design is differentiated from most other modes of research that study things as they are; instead, design considers how things might be.”
Interviews and ideation workshops are just some of the ways that civic designers engage with participants of different backgrounds and abilities to discover challenges to a policy, place or service and imagine solutions. Engagement efforts must not only include diverse participants but enable their collaboration. It’s important that both the process and outcomes work towards equity and that people can contribute with their preferred form of expression. We Who Engage shares “Design for the margins means centering the experiences and knowledge of marginalised people and groups. If you design your solution so that it works for those at the margins, it will likely work for those in the middle.”
Civic design is collaborative
Civic design acknowledges that the issues facing our communities are complex and multifaceted. As Carl DiSalvo and Christopher Le Dantec explain, governments, businesses and organisations are “built to excel at certain goals and none of them are designed to do everything well. It is only when we weave those tools together that we gain the capacity to sustain forward movement.”
Civic design is collaborative not just in the way that it invites community participants to engage with the process and bring their perspectives, but in that design itself can be informed by different methods, perspectives and histories. “By framing the city as a collection of civic relations, of which customer-provider is just one among many, we can begin to address different kinds of accountabilities, whether those take the shape of processes, instrumented infrastructures, or data-driven decision making.”
Although it can be challenging to use design for experimentation in government, City of Stonnington Service Design Lead Gabrielle Grist says that design can be positioned as a tool to de-risk initiatives that are being rolled out. “When you don’t include people in the process, you’re making decisions based on assumptions and that can be dangerous.”
Image by Parabol.
Civic design is a long-term practice
Safety, health and happiness are some of the outcomes that civic designers use to measure the effectiveness of their work, and these can’t be understood overnight.
“A civic design practice is understanding that societal challenges are not problems to solve but a series of dilemma to be better managed,” says Carl DiSalvo and Christopher Le Dantec. Even after taking the time to understand challenges and work with a community to find equitable solutions, the job is not done. We need to continue uncovering privilege and access in our communities to better understand how we can enable participation.
Using civic design principles
How can we use civic design principles to inform our work? We Who Engage shared a civic design framework for a better approach to public conversations during a time of crisis that offers great insights into different stages of civic design.
Framing
How we frame an issue directly impacts which actions may or may not be appropriate. Framing conversations are perhaps the most important type for members of a demographically complex public, where each person brings a unique understanding of a given issue. When we each share these perspectives, we gain a richer and fuller understanding of any issue, and a greater array of options and opportunities for public decision-making in the future.
Ideation
Conversations around ideation ask the public to imagine possible and even improbable solutions to a particular issue, challenge, or policy. They are not the place for decisions to be made, but the place where people can witness their collective intelligence and creativity.
Prioritising
The public is asked to weigh the value of particular actions or paths forward. Prioritising conversations identify an array of options, of which any one would result in an equitable improvement. These options can come from what was generated through an ideation conversation, or they could have emerged from another process.
Deciding
When we are faced with choosing one option from among a set of viable options, we are weighing trade-offs based on our values. When the public is able to have open conversations about these trade-offs, it turns debate into an opportunity to build connection, and it is more likely that more members of the public can live with the final decision, even if it was not what they would have chosen at the outset.
Implementing
In a democracy, the public also has an integral role in implementing decisions that impact them. Yet, the public rarely has the opportunity to be in this type of conversation. Conversations around implementation create these opportunities for the public to put decisions into action.
Monitoring
Monitoring conversations create opportunities for the public to reflect upon and monitor the effectiveness and equity of decisions over time. Better implementing and monitoring conversations inform better framing conversations in the future.
"When you don’t include people in the process, you’re making decisions based on assumptions and that can be dangerous."
Community collaboration at each design stage can support the development and implementation of effective strategies, policies and services. Civic design is a tool that can be used to discover challenges, work together towards potential solutions and enable wider and ongoing participation.