Finally, the civic designer needs a different set of guiding metaphors.

Reliance on neoliberal relations that mask political configuration and exclusion as natural forces need to be displaced; likewise, simple critiques of neoliberalism without deep involvement with communities of interest should be recognized as the acts of privilege they are. What these metaphors are is still an open question. But it is increasingly clear that the discourses of efficiency and data-driven insight that motivate much of contemporary civic tech are failing to provide conceptual frames that actually speak to our lived conditions.

WHAT ARE CIVIC DESIGN
CHALLENGES?

With the need to both rethink what designers need to know and what they need to do within a civic context, we can begin tracing out several challenges that face civic design. These are areas we have encountered through our own work and that point to larger classes of problems around which civic design might form a large-scale agenda. This list should grow and evolve as we mature our efforts around practicing and studying design in, and as, civics.

Rethinking service relations.

Many municipalities are turning to interaction design as a way to reshape public administration around improved customer service. This notion, that the public consumes services provided by municipalities and local governments, is consistent with the market-is-all move of neoliberalism, but undermines key attributes of civic encounters— namely that cities are not composed of services, but rather of people who live in them. Shifting our focus from city as service to city as collective or commons has important implications on everything from how we interact with elected and professional officials, to how we conceive and implement smart city programs. 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.

Enabling non-participation, non-compliance. Much of the design work within the domain of civics has been focused on increasing participation.

But shouldn’t communities have the right to not participate? What of those situations where the “opportunity” to participate is meaningless, or worse, where participation validates the mere appearance of openness without any matching commitment to backing that appearance with action? Similarly, how can civic designers support activities of non-compliance, those sorts of actions in which our partners decide to explicitly and purposefully flout procedures, regulations, and laws?

Understanding the breadth of “community engagement.” The foil to enabling non-participation and non-compliance as legitimate modes of civic encounter is the need to understand a breadth of practices and goals around community engagement.

Sometimes such practices are simply one-way information sharing; at other times, they mean deeply participatory processes with shared agency and accountability. Moving between these poles means civic designers need to take care and develop nuanced process interventions, interaction techniques, and system affordances so that engagement as political expedient is not confused with engagement as deeply participatory process.

Opportunities beyond academia.

If we look to the spread of civic design, digital civics, and civic media programs, it would seem many students are drawn to this work. But what will this education prepare them for?

There is still a lack of opportunity for professional civic designers. Few studios or consultancies specialize in this work, and there are limited opportunities across civil society organizations. As educators, we also need to become advocates and develop professional opportunities for our students. For many of us, this is unfamiliar work. And yet, if we don’t do so, students will soon look elsewhere for their careers.

The goal across these challenges is to build an agenda of civic design capable of recognizing and embracing contentious politics. It is precisely those

 

DOI: 10.1145/3137097 COP YRIGHT HELD BY AUTHORS. PUBLICATION RIGHTS LICENSED TO ACM. $15.00

contentious politics that enable us to produce the communities—urban or rural—in which we live. The current assumptions around rationalized service delivery and responsive customer service work to omit conflict by black-boxing decisions and process behind data, algorithms, and technical problem solving. Opening these up so that they may be understood, contested, and remade through collective and public efforts is fundamental to civic design. To move in this direction, to contribute to the invention of new modes of belongingness and togetherness, requires that we begin doing, teaching, and researching design differently, and this too is a collective affair, requiring new coalitions of researchers, practitioners, and organizations.

 

Endnotes

1. Gordon, E., D'Ignazio, C., Mugar, G., and Mihailidis, P. Civic media art and practice: Toward a pedagogy for civic design.

Interactions 24, 2 (Mar.–Apr. 2017), 66–69; https://doi.org/10.1145/3041764

2. Lampe, C. Citizen interaction design: Teaching HCI through service. Interactions 23, 6 (Nov.–Dec. 2016), 66–69; http:// dx.doi.org/10.1145/2991895

3. Olivier, P. and Wright, P. Digital civics: Taking a local turn. Interactions 22, 4

(Jul.–Aug. 2015), 61–63; http://dx.doi. org/10.1145/2776885

4. Le Dantec, C. A. Design through collective action / collective action through design.

Interactions 24, 1 (Jan.–Feb. 2017), 24–30; https://doi.org/10.1145/3018005

5. Dombrowski, L. Socially just design and engendering social change. Interactions 24, 4 (Jul.–Aug. 2017), 63–65; https://doi. org/10.1145/3085560

Carl DiSalvo is an associate professor in the digital media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research explores the role of public design in the context of smart cities and the uses of data in contentious politics. He is the author of Adversarial Design (MI T Press).

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Christopher Le Dantec is an associate professor in the digital media program in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. His research is focused on the intersection of participatory design, digital democracy, and smart cities. He is the author of Designing Publics (MIT Press).

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