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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