FORUM COMMUNITY + CULTURE

irrelevant, simply that for a system to be well designed for the civic context, the role of designer must play out with deference and humility.

The deference and humility that come from perspectives in PAR mean civic design requires an embeddedness that other forms of product design do not. Shared across the nascent programs in civic design and civic media are deeply collaborative partnerships with nonprofits, municipalities, and other civic organizations. These partnerships place designers into the field and demand a kind of civic activism. Whether addressing the mundane challenges of creating digital services for staid bureaucracies, or taking radical action to confront and dismantle systemic oppression and injustice, the measure of effect and the ability to act through design rests in building lasting and robust local relations in place. At a minimum, civic design means being an ally, but more often it means becoming an accomplice (wittingly or not) [ 5].

Attuning how we do design in civic contexts also means revisiting the tenets of design thinking. Perhaps most glaringly, in the context of civic design, to what extent is the notion of empathy still appropriate? It certainly makes sense when we imagine the client-designer relationship common to industry, where empathizing with the client (or the client’s customer) helps create insight into product innovation.

But it’s not at all clear that empathy is an appropriate frame of reference for a committed and engaged civic designer, because empathy suggests an otherness.

But if the civic designer is engaged as an accomplice, empathy loses its relevance. In the place of methods for developing empathy, then, we need to consider methods for developing a sense of belongingness, a sense of mutual commitment, while not glossing over the inherent power relations at play in any project.

in places like the digital media program at Georgia Tech (our home), at Emerson, at Newcastle University, and certainly others we may have inadvertently omitted. If a valid concern of civic design is that designers begin playing the role of the state, then the training of those designers must transcend the technical and material mastery of human-computer interaction, data science, and engineering psychology. The challenge for design education in more traditionally technical institutions that train HCI professionals is to make a turn toward the liberal arts: If every liberal arts student needs to learn to program, then every programmer (and designer) needs to learn the liberal arts.

WHAT MUST A CIVIC
DESIGNER DO?

The civic designer will also need to consider new modes of encounter—new ways of working with communities, with government and non-government agencies, with all manner of civil society, and even (perhaps especially) with those who work beyond our normal conceptions of what is appropriate or civil action. Indeed, one of the activities of discovery and invention that we need to pursue is to rethink and remake our research methods. Much can be drawn here from participatory action research (PAR) and those within design and HCI who have led the way in bringing PAR to bear on work in these fields. The central concern here is twofold: first, that civic design projects derive from their local context, in which the individuals and groups working toward their own outcomes determine what needs to be explored and created through design (local here might mean national or international—it’s simply the frame within which people are working); second, that the assessment of good design, or effective systems, rests again on the situated groups’ judgment of whether and to what degree the artifacts advanced their cause. These represent a shift, in particular for some design practices where problem setting, solving, and assessing rest primarily on the professional practices, material mastery, and aesthetic judgments of highly trained individuals. We are not arguing that trained design acumen is

Civic design requires
an embeddedness
that other forms
of product
design do not.

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