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).
→
cdisalvo@gatech.edu
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).
→
ledantec@gatech.edu