Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight
compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction
design field as a whole. — Christopher A. Le Dantec, Editor
FORUM COMMUNITY + CULTURE

Carl DiSalvo and Christopher A. Le Dantec, Georgia Institute of Technology
Civic Design

and a relationship to the status quo?

The other set of concerns is about the products of civic design and what happens when designers, through those products, play the role of the state: deciding who gets access to what features under what conditions and to what effect.

To begin to sketch out the landscape of what civic-design grand challenges look like, we want to consider three beacons that shape what it means to do civic design or be a civic designer.

WHAT DOES A CIVIC
DESIGNER NEED TO KNOW?

The first beacon has to do with the knowledge needed by designers working in a civic capacity. Civic design aims to do more than develop communications, products, and services in support of existing organizations, doing the work they’ve always done. Rather, civic design aims to contribute to new forms of living together. This is why research is crucial. It is not enough to streamline existing processes; what is needed is the discovery and invention of new modes of organizing and action. Methods of design inquiry are particularly well suited to this because design is fundamentally about that which has yet to exist. Whether we label it constructive or critical, design is differentiated from most other modes of research that study things as they are; instead, design considers how things might be.

Of course, design cannot take on civics alone—it may not even be the place of design to lead. Whatever “the civic” is, regardless of political position,

Elections in former superpowers have brought about dramatic shifts in geopolitical power and position. Social movements on the left, right, and center are all active in visible and shifting ways. Capacities for action are changing as well, due at least partly to changes in technologies and access to technologies. It is within these messy conditions that civic design operates.

Over the past year, several important articles have appeared in these pages about the intersection between interaction design and civics: service-learning approaches to interaction design pedagogy; new graduate programs that take a deeply situated approach to creating civic designers; theoretical perspectives and methodological approaches to guide how and what designers and researchers might produce in a broadly defined civic space [ 1, 2, 3, 4]. We find these developments exciting, not least because we feel very much a part of this movement toward developing the teaching and professionalization of civic design. But also because the stakes are high when designing experiences that mediate civic life.

When we talk about civic life—and
the products of civic design—we take
a broad view that extends far beyond
the familiar rituals of democratic
participation (important as they are)
and instead focuses on the mundane
daily interactions of interacting with
neighbors, dealing with municipal
bureaucracies, and forming or working
in community groups. Across these
areas, we are careful of how we think
about civic interactions and the
valorization of participation that often
comes baked into our assumptions of
what counts as civic.
Much of this is ground covered
by our friends and colleagues in
the articles mentioned earlier. No
less, they have provided thoughtful
and exciting approaches to how we
train future interaction designers to
consider and weigh trade-offs between
participation and resistance, collective
and individual action, and privileged
moments of democratic participation
and the tedium of established
bureaucracies. Building from the
kinds of considerations involved in
developing a design-training program
around the civic space, we want to ask:
What kinds of grand challenges should
the theories, methods, programs, and
professional practices of civic design
be organizing around? Within this
question are sets of questions around
how we approach what it means to “do
civics”: How do we understand access,
privilege, participation, resistance,

Insights
→ Civic design is a collective affair,
informed by a multiplicity of fields,
methods, and theories.

→ The civic designer is an embedded accomplice and will need to consider new ways of working with communities, government and non-government agencies, and all manner of civil society.

→ Civic design will need to be critical about participation, resistance, and a variety of modes of engagement.