Reflect and Chart Forward
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
Key Insights
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Systemic design, ethics, and inclusion underpin the future directions of civic design, weaving through all sessions.
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Governments globally face similar challenges in equitable design, highlighting shared struggles and opportunities.
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Designers must first do internal work, including recognizing their power and biases, before shifting power to communities.
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Inclusive usability testing benefits from compensating diverse community members to participate meaningfully.
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Scaling civic design impact requires understanding structural policies and intervening at systemic levels, as shown by Public Policy Lab's approach.
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Trauma-informed design requires years of investment and challenges designers to avoid re-traumatizing research participants.
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Radical participatory design reframes design as a communal iterative process that redistributes power sustainably.
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There is a paradox in civic design between maintaining expert rigor and democratizing design literacy broadly.
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Future civic design needs to be localized, turning design to serve place-based communities for sustainable impact.
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Ongoing community connection and co-creation via Slack and monthly calls are vital for maintaining momentum post-conference.
Notable Quotes
"Everyone, both speakers and participants, understood the assignment of civic design from day one."
"Our job as civic designers is to bring government needs and community needs into alignment."
"Everything can be designed – ourselves, relationships, processes, policies, systems."
"How do we know how to evaluate radical participatory design? Has there been a sustained shift in power?"
"Future-facing regulatory structures can avoid post-traumatic innovation by anticipating technology’s social impacts."
"Being a positive deviant means confronting challenges with limited resources but innovative, community-based approaches."
"We need to slow down decision-making processes so that ethics and systems thinking scale with project scope."
"The future of civic design will be localized, designed for and by communities rather than dictated top-down."
"Designers must do the internal work of self-awareness and reflection before shifting power to communities."
"Working on a different word than empower: People already have power, we have to respect it."
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