Bria Alexander
DesignOps Curator
Ariel Kennan
Senior Fellow, Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation
Charlotte Lee
Strategic Lead for CX and Innovation, Granicus
Sarah Brooks
Human Interface Design, Apple
Emily Lessard
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Bellweather Agency
Gordon Ross
Vice President and Partner, OXD
Joanne Dong
Life-centred Design, Systems Innovation (Si) Toronto Hub
Summary
Join us to reflect one what we’ve shared and learned over the past three days at this first gathering of the global civic design community. We’ll consider together where our field is headed and our hopes for the future. Come to share your reflections and charge up on how you’ll take what you’ve learned back out into your work and practice.
Key Insights
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Civic design must integrate systemic thinking, ethics, inclusion, and life-centered approaches to meet future challenges.
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Embedding designers within government institutions, as shown by speakers from the US and Mexico, is critical to advance equitable policy and practical design action.
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Personal reflection and awareness are foundational for designers to shift power toward communities effectively.
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Inclusive usability testing with compensated community members leads to more equitable and useful civic services.
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Participatory design is deeply rooted in ancient communal traditions and requires a sustained shift in power among design teams.
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Trauma-informed design must move beyond intent to a long-term commitment to not retraumatize vulnerable populations.
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Regulatory frameworks need to be future-facing to anticipate social impacts of emerging technologies, preventing post-traumatic innovation.
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There is a tension between democratizing design knowledge broadly and maintaining deep expertise necessary for effective civic design.
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Localized approaches to civic design foster more authentic and sustained societal change.
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Building resilient personal relationships within government teams enhances trust and enables honest conversations critical to civic design success.
Notable Quotes
"Our job as civic designers is to bring government needs and community needs into alignment."
"Designing procurement processes can fundamentally change outcomes and experiences inside and outside government."
"Positive deviants are trailblazers who confront challenges with common and counterintuitive approaches, often with fewer resources."
"Participatory design is not what you think it is—it’s about taking information, generating ideas, and testing them out collaboratively."
"How do we know if radical participatory design has shifted power sustainably among the research and design team?"
"We need to slow down decision-making processes to scale with ethics and systems thinking, not just speed."
"The future of civic design will not be driven by technology alone but by designers becoming community members, positive deviants."
"Resilience, faith, and optimism are key themes for our future in civic design."
"We have to respect people's power rather than in-powering them."
"If designers could work themselves out of their jobs, then we’d have done our job."
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