Q&A

If design needs to be long-term, can we, and should we, as designers, strive to be apolitical? What might that look like?

José dos Santos, Head of Design Americas, Signify

“I believe the best long-term solutions that may create the desired impact on people, the planet, and profit should be split from ideology and strive to build bridges between political sides. This might sound counterintuitive for designers who believe so many important issues seem to align better with one side of the political spectrum, and it might be impossible for anyone to be truly apolitical, but if we need to change from short term, political-term based programs and solutions (and corporate quarterly revenues…), design must find a different way to co-create, co-implement and co-own a different future.” 

Jennifer Rittner, Assistant Professor, Parsons School of Design

“Let’s start with asking why we think design needs to be long term. Design, like politics, needs to respond adequately to the needs of the time and not remain beholden to mythologies of originalism. In that sense, all design is political in that it concerns itself with the politics of space, of interaction, of ethics, of care, of order, of justice, of shared values. So no, design should not be apolitical because it needs to respond and reflect the politics of our time. Reparative and justice-oriented design must concern itself with the body politic—the systems, policies, and institutions that form the foundation of civic life and global existence.

That “politics” is distinct from “Politics” in the sense of political parties, which is frankly up to
the designer or design firm to determine. But how can you disentangle politics from design in any real and meaningful way?”

Shagufta Hakeem, Interdisciplinary Researcher

“This is a really important question during a time where many designers are examining the role of politics and how projects are funded. If the design involves the betterment of society there should be a balance of thought across all disciplines. What should be avoided is identity politics, which creates more polarization among communities. In the long-term, designers should strive to exit silos instead of be apolitical.”

Erin Narloch, Founder, PastForward

“Political affiliations and meanings are contemporary. Throughout time, these perceptions
and interpretations are evaluated and reevaluated by different sets of individuals or groups through their own unique and temporal lens. What lies beyond politics? What’s the least common denominator among us—our humanity.”

George White, Principal, Orange Octopus

“Exactly the opposite! Design is always political, whether the designer intends it or not. The nature of design is to make deliberate choices about the shape of a thing, and those choices determine who is included with the envelope of a design and who is included. But there’s another question embedded here, which is this: should designers seek to be explicitly political in how and what they design? Again, I think the answer has to be yes, especially if we want our work to have significant impact, today and possibly into the future. Design has to be relevant, and therefore aligned to the needs of people, and the context in which they exist. For example, a designer who chooses to make a product out of sustainable materials (when it might not have been made that way previously) is acknowledging and including political considerations into their design. They are making a statement and a choice and passing that along to the users of that design.

Design has often been a tool used to shape opinion and transmit culture. If designers attempt to separate themselves from politics, to pretend that there is some “ideal design” that is somehow divorced from our broader context, they will ultimately end up creating something that is useless, or worse yet, may be misused by someone who understands the nature of that design and can exploit it in ways that were never intended. Politics is as much a part of design as craft, aesthetics, and innovation.”

Recommendations

Social Design Insights Podcast

The Curry Stone Design Prize podcast, Social Design Insights, is a podcast of conversations with leading designers who discuss innovative projects and practices that use design to address pressing social justice issues. The podcast is hosted by Eric Cesal and produced by Baruch Zeichner. – Eric Corey Freed, Principal, Director of Sustainability, CannonDesign

Future Ethics

Future Ethics by Cennydd Bowles. From the publisher: “Future Ethics transforms modern ethical theory into practical advice for designers, product managers, and software engineers alike. Cennydd Bowles uses the three lenses of modern ethics to focus on some of the tech industry’s biggest challenges: unintended consequences and algorithmic bias, the troubling power of persuasive technology, and the dystopias of surveillance, autonomous war, and a post-work future.” – George White, Principal, Orange Octopus 

Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act

Read the Fashion Sustainability and Social Accountability Act (Assembly bill A8352) to understand the New York State’s push to improve transparency of fashion retailers and manufacturers as well as support environmental projects. – Jennifer Rittner, Assistant Professor, Parsons School of Design

Mediocre

Mediocre by Ijeoma Oluo. The publisher notes, “Through the last 150 years of American history—from the post-reconstruction South and the mythic stories of cowboys in the West, to the present-day controversy over NFL protests and the backlash against the rise of women in politics—Ijeoma Oluo exposes the devastating consequences of white male supremacy on women, people of color, and white men themselves. Mediocre investigates the real costs of this phenomenon in order to imagine a new white male identity, one free from racism and sexism. As provocative as it is essential, this book will upend everything you thought you knew about American identity and offers a bold new vision of American greatness.” – Shagufta Hakeem, Interdisciplinary Researcher

The difference that government design makes in the lives of people 

By Dana Chisnell, Civic and Policy Designer

In June of 2020, Julie told a researcher—who was studying the experience
of applying for unemployment in a pandemic—that she and her partner had between 3 and 6 months worth of savings. They were worried about how long they would be able to pay their rent without income from work.

Julie had a pet-sitting business, and her partner had worked as a mechanic at an amusement park for years. But now there were no pets to take care of and no one was going to amusement parks. They had no idea how long this situation would last. The pandemic unemployment story threads together some of the dominant challenges to design in government, as well as what makes doing design in government so great. I see the difference that design makes in the lives of the people I serve every single day, in both large and small ways. Doing design in government actually makes me optimistic. Government services simply have to work. When they do work well, it’s because design made a difference.

We all need government services. Government is irreplaceable.

Julie and her partner were both out of work. There was no work to be had. They needed help. Julie had struggled with health related unemployment and disability for years before the pandemic. She’d been diagnosed with Common Variable Immune Deficiency (CVID). With this immune disorder, she was more vulnerable than ever during a pandemic. Her partner had never applied for unemployment before, but Julie had. So she applied for disability for herself, and took on applying for unemployment for her partner.

As a small business owner, Julie was eligible for the Paycheck Protection Plan (PPP) offered through the U.S. federal Small Business Administration (SBA). The program was complicated to apply for, and she wasn’t sure that she could meet the conditions of the potential loan. In addition, using PPP to cover wages for her pet-sitting staff would pay them less than what they could get by claiming Pandemic Unemployment benefits. She wondered if she should bother with the loan if her workers could do better by other means.

People come to government to get help when they have needs that they can’t meet otherwise. They’re sometimes in distress, and often stressed when they do come to government for help or other services. Taking the context into account is a key reason to have designers in government: we can help close the gap between the front office and what is happening for real people in the real world through design research. If the unemployment system was designed to meet Julie’s needs, it would remove the load of learning government programs. She shouldn’t have to learn how government is organized – especially while under emotional, psychological, and financial stress. Design could have helped make the program easier to find, understand, and navigate.

Government service ecosystems are large, complex, and difficult for the public to navigate

As designed in the laws that created pandemic response programs, the idea was that the needs of workers like Julie would be met in a new federal program for people who worked as contractors or gig workers. These are jobs that typically don’t pay into the existing unemployment insurance system. In this new pandemic program, the federal government would fund the payments for people like Julie.

But it wasn’t as simple as updating existing forms for the new programs. Yes, the forms needed to make it possible for people to apply who might be newly eligible because of new programs. People also had to learn that they were eligible (many for the first time in their working lives), usually from state government websites. They had to learn where to go to apply, then set up an account, and file the form. They had to support their application with evidence of their previous income, and verify their identity.

Of the 33 people like Julie who told the researchers about their experiences, not one said that the unemployment website where they filed their claims was easy to use. And filing the claim was just the beginning. Several participants reported that tracking their claim, verifying their identity, and correcting mistakes became their new full time job as they waited weeks or months for the first payment to arrive in their bank account.

In government, solutions – services – are sliced up in ways that make it difficult to identify who owns the problem. How these programs get delivered comes back to dozens of design decisions. Decisions made by government officials who are all trying to meet the challenges of the moment. But the services and the ecosystems they exist in are huge. They’re complex. And if not designed to meet the public where it is, the services can be difficult to navigate. The design decisions made by lawmakers, regulators, and program implementers made a difference in Julie’s access to unemployment payments. One of the most challenging aspects of meeting Julie’s needs was time. Could the government implement new programs and process her application before Julie’s savings ran out and as the pandemic wore on?

The time scale and pace of designing and delivering government services is different from private sector products, often for good reasons

Julie said that she and her partner had about 3 months’ worth of savings. In June of 2020, no one knew that the pandemic would last for a couple of years. Spinning up new services usually takes years in government, no matter what level you’re working in. To spin up new services within a few weeks—or even a few months—is a challenge that few government agencies could pull off. There are updates to systems, yes. But the challenges start far upstream from there. 

UI Online, the California Employment Development Department webapp incorporated fields for pandemic unemployment in April 2020

There’s a stereotype that government can’t do certain things well or that it lags behind the private sector in its design and delivery of services. There’s an implied dynamic of the private sector being better at these things, somehow. But there’s an argument to be made that the cautious consideration of the needs of the public and the responsibilities to taxpayers are exactly the type of design constraints you want on public services. To deliver services in ways that protect taxpayer interests and beneficiaries, government errs on the side of resilience and long term sustainability of programs, rather than efficiency and speed. Throwing an experiment into “the market” to see if it works when “the market” is underserved and vulnerable is unethical and irresponsible. “Fail fast” doesn’t work when failing means that someone doesn’t get a service or a benefit that helps them stay housed, fed, and healthy.

Data from design practices like user research and usability testing help mitigate risks of service failures. It’s worth the time to get data from these practices, because they can inform design decisions and problem definitions. When problems are well defined, it’s easier to design solutions that positively affect the efficiency and speed of delivery of services. When services work well, people like Julie perceive that, and are more likely to trust government services, even if they aren’t delivered on a tech sector timeline.

“The boulders we choose to push are huge and half buried in the dirt. It takes a lot of leverage to move them.” — Harlan Weber

Government services must serve everyone at every intersection of their lives, especially when the stakes are high

Government services must be designed for literally everyone. In the worst of times, government services must work well for everyone while they are distressed, desperate, and exhausted. The stories from the study that Julie was in revealed complexities and intersections of real, human lives. Design offers methods and techniques for addressing realistic life challenges that the public naturally brings with them when they interact with government services.

For example, people like Julie were unemployed (with no prospects because everything was shut down) and afraid of losing their homes. Others in the study were taking care of others who might or might not be sick, homeschooling their kids, and/or dealing with shortages of food and staples. Several of the participants in the study that Julie was in had experienced the death of a friend or a family member from COVID-19 or other causes in the weeks before their interview. People were suffering, and they took that struggle with them as cognitive load when they applied for unemployment.

This is a level of severity that many of the designers I talked with for this article hadn’t considered much before they went to work in public service. In their private sector jobs, they could assume that the user of their catering app or the e-commerce site or the music delivery app, or meditation app or the investment site they worked on were reasonably affluent, educated, and unflustered. (Healthcare is one notable exception.) The products and services they’d worked on before generally were not high stakes. They didn’t have to consider people with low vision or blindness, who were hard of hearing or deaf, had mobility or dexterity issues. They didn’t have to think much about whether their own privilege and biases and assumptions about the world were going to harm someone. Not considering these factors is also a set of design decisions. (And wouldn’t it be great if every designer did come to work with all of this as part of their practice?)

llustration showing wait times for participants in a research study, March – June 2020.

Government serves individuals but people operate in relationships

Julie’s story – and the stories of others – showed the researchers that the way people experienced interacting with government was not as a lone person. Julie applied for her partner. Others in the study helped parents, children, or siblings. The benefits available in the service ecosystem beyond unemployment payments could depend on how many people were in the household, how much income or savings they have, ages, abilities, and needs. As Julie and her partner navigated unemployment claims, they were also trying to use other government programs at the same time. But there isn’t a one-stop shop where someone could say, “Hey, I’m struggling, what help can I get.” While government services exist in vast ecosystems, every applicant is also a member of familial, social, and geographic webs of relationships. Designing benefit programs that see people like Julie as whole persons who exist in relationships with histories and futures would help her survive in the short term and thrive post-crisis.

Designing for massive numbers of people in need

Julie was among 33 participants in the study. But the scale of need across the U.S. was enormous—far greater than at any time since the Great Depression in the 1930s, when 12.8 million people were out of work.

In the spring of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard in the United States and around the world. In the U.S., in April of 2020, the unemployment rate was 14.7%. About 21 million people applied for unemployment that month. At least another 2 million were without work but had not filed an unemployment claim.1 21 million users doesn’t seem like a lot compared to the scale of some private sector digital services. For example, as of March 2022, Facebook claimed nearly 180 million users in the U.S., and 2.9 billion worldwide. TikTok has 1 billion users. Amazon claims that more than 197 million people shop on their site every month. 

But unemployment claims give us a lagging indicator for the health of the economy. We want that number to be low. While U.S. unemployment was 14.7% in April of 2020, it had been only 3.6% in December of 2019. It stayed pretty close to that through March 2020, and then spiked in April. Imagine scaling your business from 5.8 million users in January to 23 million in April. It might be the kind of growth that tech companies dream of, but even the best run state government programs in the best of times could not come close to scaling that much that fast.

To manage that kind of growth and implement new programs, quickly, was a challenge unlike any other that anyone working in government had ever encountered. As Cyd Harrell pointed out to me, “The service complexity and the stakes are also much higher [than for private sector tech companies]. Facebook isn’t adjudicating whether people have properly verified income.”

Julie’s experience of encountering confusing programs that were difficult to navigate was shared by tens of millions of other people in the summer of 2020. Many of those people were in deep need. Design could have helped program implementers understand and anticipate what that level of need —combined with a complexity of programs—would mean for customer service, case management, and making decisions on who to pay and how much to pay them.

“Having a pulse on what the lived experience is like and having access to the levels making decisions is important to closing the gap” — Sha Hwang

The power imbalance is bonkers

A key role in government services is that of the person who makes the decision about whether and how much of a benefit a member of the public gets. Let’s call that person an adjudicator. They might be a TSA officer, or an account manager at the Social Security Administration, or a claims approver at the Department of Veterans Affairs. They could be an immigration officer, or the person who determines your eligibility for Medicaid, a SNAP application, or unemployment payments.

Generally, these public servants are highly trained, care about the mission, care about the people they serve, and are deeply professional. But they also hold power. And, yes, some hoard it. But even if the adjudicator is one of the best humans on Earth, the applicant may feel they are at the mercy of someone who could just be having a bad day (or a good one). That feeling is valid, even if the systems are set up to prevent individual adjudicators from making judgements that are inappropriate. Policies, which are design decisions, can also create incentives for adjudicators to behave the way they do. Everything does come back to incentives, and people do what they get rewarded for.

But power is also a factor that designers in government must deal with. They have it, simply by virtue of their position in government. If you don’t think this creates an effect in research interviews and usability tests, I challenge you to think again.

Designers must also design for adjudicators—to make it possible for them to enforce the laws and policies while still bringing their humanity and expertise into the interaction. Say Julie got through to an unemployment adjudicator on the phone to correct a mistake or check the status of her application. That touchpoint between applicant and adjudicator is designed. Can it be designed to be satisfying for Julie without compromising the adjudicator’s efficiency and priorities to prevent fraud? These are huge customer service challenges.

Listening to speeches during a naturalization ceremony at the Boston Federal Courthouse on July 4, 2015.

The hardest job I have ever loved

I’ve worked in several policy areas in government, from election administration to safety net programs, to immigration. For a couple of years, I worked on helping a federal agency called U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) to transform its services from all paper to all digital (this is still a work in progress). I’d seen all the steps of several immigration processes from the inside. It was time to see the fruits of my labor.

One day, my spouse and I trotted down to the federal courthouse in Boston. We were there to see a naturalization ceremony. There were about 100 people there, holding little American flags, dressed up, many of them accompanied by family members or friends. There was a speech by the USCIS district director, and then a judge came out. The judge asked everyone to stand up and raise their right hand and repeat the words of an oath that would complete their journey to become a citizen of the U.S. It was one of the most profound experiences I’ve ever had. People were wiping away tears. I was one of them.

I hope these new citizens have experienced only the best that government has to offer: safety, health, and support of various kinds when it is needed. I hope that some will work in public service to make life better and more hopeful for others. Because that’s the gift I receive every day as a designer in government – hope.

Working in government makes me optimistic. Even when the work feels deeply frustrating, agonizingly slow, and mired in bureaucracy. And especially when I have the privilege of working on something that is emergent, urgent, or a crisis. Change happens in increments over time. As I said, I see the difference that design makes in the lives of the people I serve every single day, in both large and small ways. Everyone should do public service, at least for a while. It may be the hardest job you will ever love. 

1. https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_06052020.pdf

Our government is designed; design it to be better 

Fog highlights the dome of the Wisconsin State Capitol building. Photo by Anne Petersen. 

By Anne Petersen, design leader, Edited by Michi Trota

When you look at American history, you should note that our government and laws have been designed overwhelmingly by people who look like the majority of our presidents. If you live in the U.S. it’s likely you can picture them: white men.

At every level and in every branch, from the White House to the Supreme Court to Congress, this is what the designers of our democracy and government looked like and who our systems of governance were shaped to serve. Recognizing this helps us understand why government is designed the way it is, and how we can better shape the future of government design.

We have to look at the harms these designs have enabled; why American government is designed the way it is; how politicians and civil servants need to understand real-world needs; the greatest needs that government serves; and how we as designers bring lived experiences and biases that can help or harm the people we’re designing for through what we create.

The design of power

Laws are ideology made concrete, encoded into our society and culture. In America, our predecessors in politics, law, and civil service designed systems of federal, state, city, and other local government and implemented laws to protect power—specifically for themselves and those like them. And beyond the laws themselves, the rest of government—from the policies that interpret the regulations based on law to the agencies responsible for executing them and down to the technology we see implementing them—all of it is designed by those who have power, for those who have power. By politicians, civil servants, government contractors; and then supported by administrators, architects, helpline staff, and more. Their decisions can help or harm those seeking access to tax-funded services.

For example, the terms “grandfathered” and “grandfathered in” aren’t about inheritance; they’re actually about ensuring that only white male property owners could vote. After Reconstruction, six states passed laws which allowed men to vote only if they were able to vote before 1867 (generally), or if their grandfathers had been able to vote at the time. This enabled more white men to bypass hurdles like literacy tests, which were intended to exclude Black Americans, as well as most recent immigrants, from having the right to vote. Those barriers were deliberately created by lawmakers for the express purpose of protecting their power. In some cases they knew the laws they created would be struck down by the courts, but it wouldn’t matter—by that time, the people they wanted on the voting rolls would be there.

But if government and laws can be designed to concentrate power in the hands of a chosen few, they can also be designed to distribute power. A truly equitable system of government and laws that ensure equal rights in practice as well as principle is possible—if it’s intentionally designed that way.

Harm by design—and how our industry is changing

The design profession in America has lionized the input of design thinking and the professional design lens as conceived of and shaped by white people, over the direct input of people directly impacted by those designs, who reflect a wider variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds. For instance, large-scale planning requires applying for government funding and compliance with laws and zoning, which function as a means of control and retaining power, and thus contribute to a history of civic planning and design driven by efforts to enforce race and class divides. These methods vary, but have included redlining by the Federal Housing Administration, restrictive racial covenants for real estate, discriminatory financing, and more.

When federal-level courts began to strike down racial zoning laws, the Federal Highway Act of 1956 emerged as another way to restrict access to real estate and property ownership—governments claimed eminent domain and displaced not only individuals, but entire Black and Brown neighborhoods. Our current Presidential administration and Congress have committed funds to “reconnect neighborhoods cut off by historic investments,” but this won’t undo the damage done to communities by the loss of generational wealth, increase in poverty, and mounting disinvestment over the span of decades. Similar injustices have happened throughout American history, from government theft of Indigenous children as part of a forced assimilation policy run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs within the Department of the Interior, to the Chinese Exclusion Act and thereafter the Chinese Confession Program run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, to the racial profiling done by law enforcement to Muslim Americans since 9/11; the list is endless.

Recently, design thinking has come under (rightful) scrutiny, especially from within the industry. One of the most succinct criticisms is Darin Buzon’s article “Design Thinking is a Rebrand for White Supremacy,” where Buzon sharply observes “This self-righteousness that comes with being a Design Thinker consequently privileges the designer above anyone else. The result is a profession of narcissists deepening class stratification…” Pockets of designers are urging a broader reckoning in our industry and working toward solutions by focusing on design justice and decolonizing design in a trauma-informed way. We center those who are most often marginalized and co-design with communities rather than applying an “expert” white Eurocentric design lens. We also have to work toward preventing the harm and trauma that occurs to individuals and communities when design research is extractive and doesn’t adequately support participants.

Designers should question the roots of design thinking and change our practices. The month before a 2020 ban on diversity training for federal government employees went into effect, more than 50 federal civil servants participated in one of Creative Reaction Lab’s “How Traditional Design Thinking Protects White Supremacy” workshops. We found that by adopting certain industry-standard practices, we unintentionally upheld core tools of white supremacy— urgency, perfectionism, paternalism, fear of conflict, the myth of objectivity —which led to potentially extractive research practices, rather than allowing us to work with communities and individuals to improve their experiences interacting with government.

A hand-colored lithograph called “People’s Choice Twelfth President.” Artist: Nathaniel Currier, 1848. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution. 

Recent works like Virginia Eubanks’s Automating Inequality: How High-tech Tools Profile, Police, and Punish the Poor, Safiya Umoja Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism, Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, and Charlton McIlwain’s “Of course technology perpetuates racism. It was designed that way.” illustrate how our implementation of laws, technology, and policy can serve to support colonialism, white supremacy, and inequity. Eubanks, for example, shows how poor parents using the government programs meant to support their families are automatically flagged as higher risk for abuse and neglect of their children, nicknamed “poverty profiling.” As Eubanks puts it, “The model confuses parenting while poor with poor parenting,” using a data-based proxy for harm which doesn’t stem from actual abuse or neglect. But these government offices only have this data from those who use its services. An inequitable and oppressive system serves to support itself. That doesn’t happen by chance; it happens by choice.

“Boundless genders” by Amy Cousins from “Before the After Party” group exhibition at Co-Prosperity (Co-Pro). Photo by Anne Petersen

Designed to move slowly

A government serving so many people runs slowly for both good and bad reasons; it’s good that our government resists change that’s too extreme and too fast, or else we’d be vacillating from one pole to another by election cycle. But then the changing needs of its public regularly outpace the ability (and often willingness) of government to make changes at all.

For example, the Eurocentric Puritan ideals of only two genders were instilled (or installed) as America’s government first formed. Only recently have various levels of government recognized that not only should genders outside of male and female be counted in formal venues like the national census, but that identity documents provided by the government ought to reflect the actual gender of the person they identify. In Illinois, this has become an issue; while a law was passed in August of 2019 enabling an X marker on drivers licenses and state IDs, nearly three years later it is still not possible. The Illinois Secretary of State, which issues these identity documents, blamed a six-year contract with a software vendor.

For often-ignored groups, especially those who can “pass” or choose not to report the group(s) they belong to, there’s a balance between representation—being counted—and privacy—not being on “a list” anywhere in government, thereby running the risk of discriminatory or unethical use of that information. For instance, Jewish people have found throughout history that being on any official list can often be anything but beneficial. For nonbinary folks, leaning either way can be precarious. If we choose privacy, we won’t be counted and our concerns are unlikely to be represented. If we choose representation, our government will hold that list: do we trust our governments at all levels with that information? Can we in the future? The Lavender Scare—when the federal government fired or forced government employees to resign that were identified as or accused of being gay—is still in living memory, and is a warning that shouldn’t be forgotten.

The X marker solution itself is somewhat of a compromise: it isn’t intended to mean nonbinary, though nonbinary people are likely to use it. It’s meant to be used both for “neither male or female” but also “decline to state.” Cis folks may choose to use it to opt out of being identified. The official terminology used by the State Department is “unspecified or another gender identity,” though individual states’ interpretation varies.

In some cases civil servants are not given much room for interpretation, but in other cases we have a surprising amount of latitude, all depending on how the law or policy was written and who may have already had input—always within bounds, but those bounds can be dependent on budget, which also infers time-constraints. There is often not enough funding to guarantee support of a digital product for years to come. This is a risk to a product’s continued existence, one that happens with units and offices as well; the short term-limited nature of working within the U.S. Digital Service, for example, was originally presented as two years, though now four is more common. This was ostensibly intended to keep fresh industry insights entering into civil service to inform the design of government digital services, but the incidental benefit of any new Presidential administration being able to easily eliminate it through attrition likely wasn’t incidental.

The bottom line is that in all levels of government, civil servants interpret policy and design ways for it to become practical, both in process and in practice. And the choices we make about those interpretations have widespread consequences.

Design better throughout

Politicians are elected to pursue their constituents’ priorities. They create law and design budgets, which then lead to regulation, which leads to policy, which can spawn rules or guidance… and on until you get to implementation, and then ongoing support. If you can’t call a help desk or contact a human behind the system, you may not get the help you need—and all these programs require ongoing funding.

When laws and policies are designed, their outcomes are improved by the early involvement of civil servants—designers, staff at the agencies in question, developers, etc.—and the people who need the law, service, or budget. It’s incredibly clear when the politicians involved in creating laws and policies were not familiar with real-world implementation needs, from requirements of historic Indigenous treaties to the design of an initiative’s website. Early into the current pandemic, one White House office believed the best measure of success for a central informational website about COVID-19 was an increase in page views. Content strategists explained that an increase in page views could indicate that people were lost on the site. Pageviews would go up as the person clicked on page after page looking for what they needed. The people directing this work could not be dissuaded. The resulting information architecture and page length caused confusion and often did not help visitors—tough results for a crucial site.

Much about the design process would be improved by widening public involvement—Taiwan’s “people-public-private” partnerships are a prime example. Taiwan has built technology to support the public’s input on their democracy and lawmaking. Appropriate funding is vital and should include the cost of paying people for their involvement. We should pay people to help co-design implementations that impact them directly, including transportation they may need to get to a co-design session, technology to support their participation, and funding for childcare during their involvement.

The greatest need

It’s easy to think that the difference between government and the private sector lies primarily in its scale—doing the most good for the most people. Over time and with experience, that perspective can shift to prioritize doing the most good where the need is greatest—for the people and lands that need it most. That approach often also helps the most people; accessibility, for example, benefits everyone. A curb-cut benefits those with luggage, strollers, carts, or bicycles, not just people using wheelchairs. Similarly, captions and transcripts help those in loud or public places, those who want to skim text rather than watching a video, and people who process information differently, not just Deaf communities. Creating inaccessible services is a design choice, and in fact means what you’re creating is already broken.

We like to think of design research, design thinking, and our resulting design and code as objective, or at least value neutral. It is not. Because we are not. We bring our biases, our privilege, our training that has taught us to believe that we know best. As designers and design researchers, we have to do better. What are the biases you bring? Can you surface those with your team, along with theirs, so you know to look for perspectives outside of your own? So you can actively work against the assumptions that could undermine the equity in your work; so you can make your designs equitable, accessible, inclusive, and just.

We also bring our lived experiences. If you’ve experienced inequities or needs relevant to your work, you can offer those as input—but alongside people experiencing them now, not as more important or more relevant than theirs. Ask if you’re the right designer for a project and be humble enough to acknowledge when you’re not; work to put designers who can best engage with the appropriate communities in the lead. Recognize that people are the ultimate experts on their lives; center them and their needs when you design, rather than what you have been trained to see. Be reciprocal, not extractive in your research; give back as much as you take away alongside the communities you work for and with.

Can these approaches fix all of the problems we face? Likely not. But keep trying. The more approaches we create, the more we keep thinking about and iterating on how we choose to design our work, the more we share, the better we will collectively be able to do over time. As Mariame Kaba has put it: “Let this moment radicalize you rather than bring you to despair.” We can all work toward decolonizing design and toward design justice: important in every industry, but perhaps especially in the design of government and how it is implemented in the world today. 

The interior of the Lincoln Memorial, with visitors. District of Columbia. Photo by Anne Petersen

Designing the Courts 

Photo by Jackie Hope

A Conversation with Lauren Mattioli, Department of Political Science, Boston University, Interviewed By Cyd Harrell, User Researcher

As a civic UX practitioner, I spent several years designing interventions to make working with state courts easier—or even possible—for people forced to participate in civil court cases (like child custody, evictions, and restraining orders) without a crucial, designed-in feature of the system: a lawyer.

These were practical projects that most designers would recognize: simplifying instructions for filing a form, showing which local courthouses handle specific types of cases on a map, making sure court websites convey both officialness and welcome while guiding users to the information they need. Lauren Mattioli’s scholarship addresses the design of the U.S. court system, exploring how political actors contest its values and attempt to shape the outcomes courts deliver to the public. When Design Museum Magazine invited me to draw these perspectives together by interviewing Professor Mattioli, I was both intrigued and, I’ll admit, a little bit intimidated. But the resulting conversation speaks, I hope, to the reality that the court system is designed, from the power dynamics embedded within it to the processes it imposes to the signs on the doors (both the official ones and the hastily printed supplements explaining them). As courts are on every American’s mind in the summer of 2022, the design perspective is essential to understanding what is happening, how it came to be, and how we might both relieve some immediate pain and aspire to longer-term, structural change.

Cyd Harrell: First of all, a court is many things from a societal control mechanism, to a set of services expressed in rules and forms, to a ritual space—what does it mean to you to design a court?

Lauren Mattioli: Courts, as political institutions, are designed to solve problems faced by political actors. Courts help to solve the big problems of dispute resolution and legal interpretation. Political systems need some way to deal with disagreements citizens have with government and with each other. Courts provide the setting and procedures to enable that process—that’s dispute resolution. The problem of legal interpretation presents itself in a few ways: unanticipated facts challenge existing laws, laws contradict each other, or a law seems to contradict one of the polity’s higher imperatives. Courts, and, more precisely, the judges that staff them, do this important work. Designing a court might also mean deciding on the physical features of the spaces where laws are interpreted and disputes are resolved. The design of prototypical American courtroom reflects central tenets of the U.S. legal system. Consider how the courtroom represents the notions of judicial supremacy and independence: the judge usually enters from a separate door, she is physically apart from and set above the advocates, she is usually flanked by flags or sitting beneath an official seal, she doesn’t share her space with anyone else, she is on the same side as the witness. So, the design of the courtroom is a physical representation of ideas about what courts do.

CH: Who do you see as the design actors in a court system? How do they play? Who are the stakeholders they respond to?

LM: The politicians who create and empower courts are design actors. The U.S. Constitution only creates one court, the Supreme Court, and delegates the design of all lower federal courts to Congress. Congress has exercised its power over time to alter the number of federal courts, the number of federal judgeships, tiers of the judicial hierarchy, as well as courts’ geographic and substantive jurisdictions. The Judiciary Act of 1789 is the best example of this. The Act added trial and appellate courts to the federal system, creating the three-tiered hierarchy we still use today. Congress has also, at times, responded to demands for courts to process specialized cases (e.g. bankruptcy, international trade).

Congress can also play as a design actor by shaping the resources that flow to courts and adjacent institutions. For example, Congress can allocate lots of resources for staff and clerk salaries…or not. It can pay to renovate and maintain courthouses…or not. It can use its spending powers to encourage certain types of law enforcement activity and discourage others, thus affecting the supply of potential disputes to resolve. It can enable private rights of action, entitling people to enforce their rights through courts. Congress also plays a role in who becomes a federal judge—choosing whether to consider and then confirming or rejecting the president’s nominees—so in this way Congress partially determines who else may be able to act as a designer.

State courts are similar in many ways to federal courts, but diverge in others. State constitutions and legislatures define their judicial systems (similar to the federal model) but might staff their judiciary via elections or merit committee selection (different from the federal model). State courts process many more cases across a wider range of issues than federal courts do, so their systems often reflect this fact with more judgeships and more specialized courts.

Legislators at the state and federal level can be responsive to any number of stakeholders: their entire constituency, their most loyal supporters, their party, their caucus within the legislature, and their donors, to name a prominent few. So, design changes that originate in legislatures can be attributed in part or in whole to any of the aforementioned interested parties, and that attribution may vary across individual legislators voting on identical legislation, and within individual over time. For example, when Congress votes to expand the number of district court judgeships it may be responding to caseload considerations or, may do so for political reasons (de Figueiredo et. al, 2007).

CH: Some design principles that might seem obvious for courts—for example fairness & order (not to mention, in May 2022, precedent)—have been contested at many points in history. If you’re a member of the public, you might hear actors with very different court-design aims espouse the same design principles. How can regular people interpret what kind of design different actors intend, and how it will affect us?

LM: This is a really interesting question. I see design principles being employed in political rhetoric in several ways: to distract, to defend, and to divide.

Distract: A common rhetorical move politicians make is emphasizing what are sometimes called “valence” parameters–these are nonideological characteristics that everyone usually wants more of, no matter what: loyalty, beauty, competence, etc. Design principles, like orderliness, fairness, and efficiency, are valence terms for government processes. A politician who wins her election by a narrow margin might want to emphasize the less divisive features of her victory: the quality of the democratic process. A prosecutor defending his high conviction rate might avoid mention of specific cases (for which people may have well defined ideas about guilt or innocence) by concentrating on “the system of justice” and how well it works. So, uncontroversial design principles can function as a rhetorical crutch for politicians who would prefer not to emphasize their actual behavior.

Defend: Relatedly, politicians often use outcomes to demonstrate the validity of a democratic process, or say that the process is legitimate because of the outcome it produced. Something like: “American elections are free and fair because I won.” Incumbents have an interest in maintaining their own power so they often claim the democratic quality of their election to be higher than it actually was. You may have noticed that incumbents complain about gerrymandering, campaign finance, and voter suppression a lot less than challengers do. Similar rhetorical moves are everywhere, the arguments essentially boil down to something like “the Supreme Court’s lack of transparency is fine because the Court produces outcomes I agree with” or “the Senate can refuse to consider a president’s judicial nominations because I don’t want his candidate to be appointed” or, my personal favorite, “the Constitution is a great, democratic document because America has persisted for two and a half centuries” This teleological orientation helps actors justify the maintenance of unfair institutional designs.

Divide: Finally, orderliness, “normality”, and “civility” are concepts that might be considered design principles, that feature in attempts (often successful) to activate racist, sexist, or classist ideas about opposition to the status quo. A classic example of this is Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign for president in which he emphasized “law and order,” a strategy which many scholars consider a thinly veiled appeal to white discomfort around racial liberalism. By distinguishing between the lawful and the unlawful, obedient and disobedient, orderly and disorderly, politicians can give psychological cover to people who are reluctant to sacrifice their privilege but don’t want to think of themselves as bigots.

So, how is the average person supposed to know what an actor intends? This is really tough because successful strategic actors know how to conceal their intentions when it suits them. This is especially true when talking about courts because there are well entrenched norms around pretending to value neutrality and impartiality, so the rhetoric might be especially convoluted. It’s safe to assume that liberals are going to try to get more liberal policy outcomes from courts and conservatives are going to try to get more conservative policy outcomes from courts. You’d be hard-pressed to find a judge or elected official that acts according to their beliefs about design if it means betraying their ideology. Bush v Gore (2000) is a great example of this. Conservatives on the Supreme Court went against their longstanding tradition of rejecting equal protection claims and reserving election law decisions to the states in order to rule in Bush’s favor. Liberals set aside a historical preference for federal control in state elections in order to side with Gore (Segal & Spaeth 2002).

CH: Can you say a little about how our system came to be designed as it is? Is there a good example of a particular person redesigning a court?

LM: The drafters of the Constitution and representatives in the first congresses were, predictably, familiar with the British court system. As such, the colonial courts, early state courts, and federal courts shared many features of the British system while rejecting others. One instance of this legacy is still a major design element of courts, the right to trial by a jury of one’s peers. Jury trials were a major rallying point for American revolutionaries after the right was restricted during the colonial period. Juries were and continue to be venerated as a democratizing feature of government (whether they actually serve to democratize is another matter). Other norms, such as a declared preference to free the guilty rather than punish the innocent, come from British common law. Blackstone’s Commentary on the Laws of England codified these norms (itself a controversial move) and was a popular touchstone in early American legal history.

Another influence on the current design of the court system is the experience of living without a national court system during the Revolutionary war and immediate postwar period. The articles of Confederation did not provide for a court with federal jurisdiction. When disputes arose among citizens from different states, the court hosting the trial overwhelmingly sided with their fellow citizens against outsiders. Both Alexander Hamilton and James Madison lobbied for a federal judiciary to deal with such disputes, sharing the belief that a national court system would resolve regional disputes more fairly. As mentioned earlier, the persistent structure of the federal judicial system was defined by the Judiciary Act of 1789. The Act placed an intermediate appellate level (called circuit courts) and lower trial courts (called district courts) under the Supreme Court. Westward expansion and a growing population required that the number, shape, and size of these jurisdictions change.

Politics is collective action, so it is tricky to single out individuals and designate them as uniquely responsible for redesigning a court system, but Chief Justice John Marshall had, with help, outsized influence on the design of U.S. courts.

John Marshall was Chief Justice of the United States from 1801 to 1835—the longest tenure of any chief. His most potent contribution to the design of U.S. courts, and the decision that enabled the Court to be a major influence while the United States was in its formative years, was Marbury v Madison (1803). You may recall that this case established judicial review, but the significance of that move cannot be overstated. The power of judicial review enables courts to declare the actions of the elected branches unconstitutional. This means a popular bill can unanimously pass both houses of Congress, get signed by the president and become law, only to be challenged in court and effectively nullified if a majority of the unelected, un-fireable justices decide the law is inconsistent with the Constitution. In Marbury v Madison, the unelected, un-fireable justices asserted that enormous power for themselves. Without the power of judicial review, federal courts would not have played the role they have in American political history. The power of judicial review shapes what politicians, lawyers, and citizens can expect courts to do.

CH: If someone now wants to design a change to the court system, how does that happen? Are there levers people should know about? Does the independence of individual judges in their courtrooms represent a challenge to design processes?

LM: If an individual wants to design a change to the court system, that can happen in a number of ways. Or, not happen, as the case may be. Broad changes to the court system itself are difficult to implement: the system itself functions incrementally, the system is huge and spans geographic and political boundaries, and engaging with courts is costly in time and money.

There are, of course, exceptions, where motivated individuals otherwise lacking in political power manage to make a big impact. Take Clarence Earl Gideon, a drifter who was serving a five-year sentence for breaking and entering in Florida when he filed a petition to the Supreme Court. Gideon’s case was the vehicle by which the Supreme Court ruled that criminal defendants are entitled to legal counsel (Gideon v Wainwright (1963)) and that states must provide indigent defendants with a lawyer.

A more typical path for individuals to make change through the legal system is to be represented by an interest group with resources and experience whose policy goals align with the individual’s interests. This is a practice called sponsored litigation and was a favored strategy of the NAACP during the civil rights movement. Brown v Board of Education I (1954), the case that declared racial segregation in schools unconstitutional, was an instance of sponsored litigation.

Another option to make a change to the court system is to work through the elected branches of government. When it comes to the federal judicial system, Congress has the most power. It can influence everything from courts’ budgets to membership to jurisdiction (with some restrictions). Reaching out to your representative and senators is the first step.

At the state level, the legislature is an option as well, but many states also have options for direct democracy. Ballot initiatives, while rife with their own set of complications, allow voters to circumvent a recalcitrant legislature.

Social science scholars disagree about the functional level of independence judges enjoy, so to say whether this independence may serve to stymie design processes requires acceptance of the claim that judges are independent. It would depend on the type of change someone was trying to make and the path they chose. Suppose an individual really wanted to see greater racial diversity in petit (trial) juries in their community. This could be pursued in a number of ways. The individual could attempt to audit their jurisdiction’s voter registration rolls (a source of names for jury pools). Individual voters are sometimes improperly removed from these lists—disproportionately marginalized people. The individual could launch a persuasion campaign, encouraging nonwhite people to verify they have not been mistakenly removed from the voter registration lists and, if called, to perform their jury service. Alternatively, the individual could lobby their representative to propose a bill in the legislature that would encourage a particular racial demographic makeup for juries. The individual could, if they live in a state which allows for ballot initiatives, attempt to get such a policy in front of voters. Taking any of these steps could result in a more diverse pool of potential jurors, and such actions which would not depend on the whims of a judge. However, a request for data, a campaign, a statute, and a ballot initiative are all potential fodder for litigation. Outside strategies don’t necessarily get to stay outside.

CH: Having recently spent time working to design forms and processes that reduce the disadvantage of vulnerable parties in the court system (for example people without lawyers in eviction cases), it often feels like this kind of work is a patch—although an urgently needed one right now—on a system with more fundamental problems. How do you see the micro and macro of court design working together (or creating more friction for each other)?

LM: It’s important to remember that for any problem one person or group identifies, another person or group might consider it to be a positive feature of the system. One example is the prevalence of plea bargains to resolve criminal matters. Depending on the court system, 90 to 97% of criminal cases end in a plea bargain. Usually this means the defendant agrees to waive their right to a trial in exchange for a reduced sentence. One reason opponents of plea-bargaining sometimes give for their position is that by threatening individuals with long prison sentences prosecutors might pressure risk-averse innocent people to plead guilty to a crime they did not commit. Proponents of plea-bargaining counter with the efficiency gains plea bargains achieve. Court dockets would be utterly swamped and every case would take longer to be considered if all criminal matters went to trial, many of which would involve defendants who do not dispute their convictions.

Of course, plea bargains are just one part of the larger criminal justice apparatus. Prison abolitionists and others committed to a more comprehensive dismantling of the carceral state might consider an effort to limit plea bargaining misplaced; the argument being that if prisons do not exist, they can’t be used to threaten the innocent into pleading guilty.

CH: I was thinking of examples like making a courtroom less intimidating in its physical design, or making a filing form easier to complete; do such design efforts give people a false sense of equity if the larger system isn’t redesigned? Are they still worth it even if so?

LM: Small scale design changes can be effective for relieving acute human misery, which can create space in a community to pursue larger, lasting reforms. You point out that micro-level can create a false sense of equity which is true, but ultimately short lived. Small victories can build experience, confidence, and momentum within social movements. The trend toward eliminating cash bail is one example. The practice of cash bail is one small part of a perverse system. Eliminating cash bail will not fix the more global problems within the criminal justice system on its own. But, that doesn’t mean eliminating the practice isn’t worth the time or effort required to do so. This is because policies can have direct and indirect effects, which you might define as micro and macro. Directly: eliminating cash bail has been shown to reduce jail populations, which improves life for those in and out of these institutions. People are more able to assist in preparing their own defense if they are not jailed prior to trial. Pretrial detention is correlated with a loss of employment, child custody, and housing–all of which contribute to recidivism. Indirectly: eliminating cash bail reinforces the idea that a defendant is innocent until proven guilty and allows us to consider broader changes to the criminal justice system.

CH: Finally, given a global pandemic that engendered huge changes to court operations plus a recent maximum of political contestation, what are the urgent design questions for courts in the next few years?

LM: I see two urgent questions for courts at present (or maybe forthcoming).

1. How can the court system stop exacerbating the problems faced by race-class marginalized people? Courts are supposed to provide a forum for groups who can’t access traditional paths to power (elections) because they are numerically small, geographically dispersed, or systematically excluded. Sometimes courts achieve this goal but more often they exaggerate existing disparities.

2. How can the court system reconfigure popular notions about the need for judges to be impartial and independent? I don’t know how much longer the myth that judges are neutral arbiters can last. If the judicial branch’s institutional legitimacy is going to survive it may have to be cultivated independently of beliefs about the individual judges who staff it. 

References:

de Figueiredo JM, GS Gryski, EH Tiller, G Zuk, Congress and the political expansion of the U.S. districts courts, American Law and Economics Review, Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2000, Pages 107–125, https://doi.org/10.1093/aler/2.1.107

Paul Milgrom, Douglass North, and Barry Weingast, “The Role of Institutions in the Revival of Trade: The Law Merchant, Private Judges, and the Champagne Fairs,” Economics and Politics 2(1):1-23 (1990)

Noel, F. R. (1937). Vestiges of a Supreme Court among the Colonies and under the Articles of Confederation. Records of the Columbia Historical Society, Washington, D.C., 37/38, 123–143. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40067495

Martin Shapiro, Courts: A Comparative and Political Analysis

Segal, J., & Spaeth, H. (2002). The Supreme Court and the Attitudinal Model Revisited. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511615696

Surrency, E. C. (1967). The Courts in the American Colonies. The American Journal of Legal History, 11(4), 347–376. https://doi.org/10.2307/844493

A Unifying Vision 

By Candace Brooks, Senior Design Researcher, Agncy 

Four years ago, I started working with Agncy, a Boston-based firm that uses design as a tool to reduce structural and systemic inequities in communities across the country. The concept of co-design is the centerpiece of our design and research work, and it allows us to create a process that is community-centered, rather than designer-centered. 

As a designer, finding Agncy was a godsend! I’d been searching for an organization where design was used as a tool to address our country’s social problems. At Agncy, I get to couple my interest in understanding why people do the things they do, with the design processes I learned as a student at Massachusetts College of Art and Design (MassArt) and the human-centered lens I learned at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT). Agncy is a place where all of my skills combine into a toolbox to deconstruct the foundational problems I see in our country. The co-design process pushes me to think harder about what service design means when working with communities, particularly when our clients are government agencies. Too often in government, the people in power are separated from the people who will experience their decisions. They are often not from the communities they serve, and have either never worked directly with those communities or haven’t in some time, as they moved their way up in rank.

In 2017, Agncy partnered with Boston Public Schools (BPS) to design Boston’s “College, Career & Life Readiness Definition (CCLR).” At the time, graduation requirements and grading standards for students from BPS, charter schools, parochial schools, and other non-profit organizations differed throughout the city’s ecosystem. The goal of the CCLR was to create a common understanding for the district and the broader Boston community, which would describe the life skills and knowledge every BPS graduate should have. This tool would then be used throughout the education ecosystem to gauge how well students were being prepared for their futures. The original CCLR design was co-created over five work sessions by BPS school leaders, teachers, community members, and district partners. In 2021, BPS school leaders and their partners wanted to re-examine the CCLR to reflect current contexts that graduates encounter, since so much had changed during the intervening five years. Once again, they invited Agncy to facilitate the co-design process. Our expectation, alongside that of the BPS high school superintendents, was to approach the changes by simply updating the existing CCLR. On a rainy day in late June 2021, approximately 30-40 school leaders convened in Essex, MA for a retreat. It was one of Agncy’s first in-person meetings since the pandemic started, and the Agncy team was excited to work together with our partners in real life again. Many of the school leaders in the room that day were different from the ones on the original co-design team. School leadership had shifted with promotions and turnover, and these new leaders wanted to see their voices reflected in the updated version. In fact, they told us they wanted to “blow it up and start from scratch.” The updated College, Career, and Life Readiness Definition, renamed the “Vision of the Graduate,” would be co-designed by a multitude of stakeholders—including school leaders, teachers, district partners, and community and business leaders—plus: it would feature more voices from students, parents, and caregivers.

Boston Public School’s College, Career and Life Readiness definition (2017)

When I reflect on the experience of redesigning the CCLR, I’m reminded of Van Phillips, the talent behind the Flex-Foot. As a student at MassArt, I attended the 1998 International Design Conference in Aspen, CO with a group of students from industrial design, architecture, fashion, and graphic design. The conference theme that year was sports, and we met academics and design practitioners from around the world who designed everything from sporting equipment and gear, to accessible national parks, to the logo and branding for the 2000 Sydney Olympics. One of the stand-out presentations that year was on the design and development of the Flex-Foot.

As a college student in 1976, Van Phillips had a water skiing accident that severed his left leg and completely upended his otherwise active lifestyle. For the first 10 years after his accident, Phillips lived with prosthetic devices prescribed by his doctors. Most were crude and somewhat clunky, fashioned out of wood made slightly more comfortable with layers of foam rubber but still contributed to Phillips being in near constant pain. Rather than succumbing to his circumstances, Phillips put on his designer and inventor hat and sought out to develop a new prosthetic device. After a summer internship in San Francisco followed by enrollment in a master’s program at Northwestern University, he was determined to create a prosthesis that would allow active people like himself to enjoy sports and the outdoors as much as anyone else. Phillips believed that “invention is almost always just arranging things in a new way.”(1) His early prosthetic designs were made to replicate a human leg and foot wearing a shoe. He self-tested every prototype—using them for running, hiking, playing tennis, you name it—but eventually, each one failed. He kept trying to recreate the leg he had lost, until he realized he had the opportunity to design something better.

This was a paradigm shift. Phillips began to work towards creating a device that would make the conditions and context of his new reality work for him, not against him. He didn’t need a prosthesis that would look like or even function the same as a human leg. He could instead create something that was built for speed, agility, and comfort. Finally, Phillips turned to nature for inspiration. Using biomimicry of the fastest land mammal on the planet, he studied how the leg of a cheetah works as a spring: compressing and flexing to propel the animal forward while running. This model from nature was the perfect mechanism, and—combined with materials that were stronger and lighter—Phillips created a device that could store and transfer energy in a way similar to a cheetah’s leg. This paradigm shift is reflected in our work at Agncy. We don’t want to recreate what already exists, and we don’t want to change people from being who they are when they’re at their best. Rather, we seek to change the system and break free of conditional restraints that require individuals to accept re-designs which do little but uphold the status quo.

The current draft of the Boston Public School’s Voice of the Graduate (2022)

I imagine Phillips was grateful for the wood prosthetic his doctors gave him, but it didn’t allow him to live his best life in his revised, current reality. Similarly, while the 2021 school leaders saw the value of the original CCLR, they knew it didn’t speak to the best their students could be, nor did it acknowledge the current realities facing their graduates outside of school. In those original designs, both Phillips and the school leaders were finding a way to color within the predetermined lines. But just as Phillips wasn’t content to live with limited mobility, the 2021 school leaders made it clear that they wouldn’t settle for a tszuj-ed up version of the old College, Career & Life Readiness Definition. Seeing new possibilities allowed Phillips to let go of a design that merely mimicked or replaced his lost leg, and it got him to consider a form that delivered the results he was actually looking for. The school leaders followed a similar path.

During the 2021 redesign, we found that the students were really excited to add their point of view to the Vision. They were particularly adamant about including elements to address diversity. They genuinely valued collaborating with and learning from people of diverse perspectives, races, ethnicities, and sexual identities. They wanted to highlight how their generation was ahead of those prior in this regard, which wasn’t something their teachers and school leaders had previously recognized. The students also felt that developing relationships, adapting to change, and the ways their classroom lessons connected to their lives outside of school needed to be included in the revised Vision. At the same time, the teachers felt their unique expertise in student skill development in the face of current social pressures should also be recognized. One teacher at the Jeremiah E. Burke High School noted how the new Vision helped her see the ways her teaching needed to change. For this teacher, the responsibility of educating young people was one that would impact the next seven generations of her students’ futures. (2) She was excited by the possibilities the revised Vision opened up for her.

Ultimately, the 2021 Vision of a Graduate was designed by the very stakeholders who would themselves use it as a tool. Dr. Lindsa McIntyre, a Secondary School Superintendent at Boston Public Schools and a dedicated partner in this work describes the impact of the Vision and how it works in concert with other initiatives this way, The Vision of The Graduate will speak to the access and opportunity provided to each and every Boston Public School student while simultaneously outlining the multiple pathways the journey to MassCore success and completion allows. The iterative process of crafting the Vision of the Graduate included multiple stakeholders; students, teachers, school leaders, administrators and community members all contributing to an understanding of the qualities of a Boston Public School graduate. The vision has been pressure tested on Innovation Pathways, Advanced Placement Course, International Baccalaureate Pathways, Early College and Dual Enrollment, as well as Career and Technical Education. All roads along this journey will lead to a progressive academic experience that enables:

• A common set of objectives across the system
• Opportunities to align work across a system that can be disparate and siloed
• Ways to connect to post-secondary stakeholders and opportunities

Teachers at the John D. O’Bryant High School hard at work sharing their feedback on the Voice of the Graduate draft.

While it was challenging to co-create something that articulated the voices of so many distinct individuals, our hard work was worth it and will serve as a unifying tool for the city. Antoniya Marinova, Director of Education to Career at The Boston Foundation and Interim Executive Director at the Boston Opportunity Agenda puts it this way:

In Boston, constructing a vision of a graduate has gathered a lot of important momentum over the past year. We are fortunate that in our city, there are a ton of initiatives and programs that seek to prepare our high school graduates for a successful future. A collective vision of what our students should know and be able to do to be prepared or that future—in other words, a vision of a graduate—can provide a unifying roadmap that anchors these multiple district-, school-, and partner-led efforts and align them in the service of the same North Star goal.

I don’t think I’ll ever forget that rainy day when the agenda for our retreat with the BPS superintendents and school leaders seemingly fell apart right before our eyes. I remember exchanging glances with my colleague thinking, “What the hell do we do now?” I knew we could throw together a draft based on what we already understood about the school district, and then share it back to them for feedback— but that would not uphold the values we have at Agncy. If we as a company aspire to honor community members through co-design, then having our planned agenda go off course was the perfect opportunity to roll up our sleeves, join forces with our client, and do the work.

Ultimately, people will have the power to opt in or out of the solutions we help design, and no one wants to join in on a system that only recreates something which is broken. I’m more convinced than ever that when design focuses on what a community is truly capable of, better outcomes are possible. This approach is not only more equitable, it also recognizes and centers expertise, and it redistributes power. Design shouldn’t be about creating a better mousetrap, and it’s not about being the only person in the room with a good idea. For me, design is about creating opportunities for everyone to find solutions to the systemic inequities we all face. Even when implemented with folks in large governmental bureaucracies, individuals can envision their own futures, rather than having power-holders attempt to define it for them. And if there are lines, the final image will be that much more beautiful when we color outside of them.

1. Davidson, Martha. “Innovative Lives: Artificial Parts: Van Phillips.” Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation. Smithsonian Institution, 20 Apr. 2020. https://invention.si.edu/innovative-lives-artificial-parts-van-phillips

2. https://www.ictinc.ca/blog/seventh-generation-principle

Interview with Baratunde Thurston, Creator & Host, How to Citizen 

Photo by Erik Carter

Interviewed By Claire-Solène Becka, Operations Coordinator, CoDesign Collaborative 

Baratunde Thurston is an Emmy-nominated, multi platform storyteller and producer operating at the intersection of race, tech, democracy, and climate. He is the host of the PBS television series America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston, creator and host of How To Citizen with Baratunde which Apple named one of its favorite podcasts of 2020, and a founding partner of the new media startup Puck. 

Claire-Solène: How do you practice citizenship? How could you design a routine to citizen? 

Baratunde: There are many elements to my citizen practice, and it’s constantly evolving. Some basics I practice are to acknowledge the people in whatever space I’m in. That means eye contact, greetings, and generally paying attention. At the city level, I explore local media where I live and support with my money and attention. I vote. I learn about the communities I live in. I compost. I’m generally careful and conscious in how I choose to use my voice. We can citizen – I prefer “citizen” as a verb – at many different levels: with ourselves, in our households, neighborhoods, companies, sports teams, workplaces, cities, states, regions, nations, and (for now just one) planet. Everyone’s routine citizen practice can be different, but I’d recommend starting that design with the four pillars of How To Citizen we came up with for the podcast. They are: show up and participate; invest in relationships with yourself, others, and the planet around you; understand power; and use all this to benefit the collective. There’s infinite possibilities in each of these for each of us. Ask yourself how each pillar might apply to your role in a particular community, then try it out. If it feels good, do it again, and again, and pretty soon you’ve got a routine.

CB: One of the pillars of How to Citizen is participation: how would you recommend designing one’s own participation? What might it look like, depending on individual values?

BT: A lot of folks think “civic engagement” or civic participation involves public office, either voting or running. Those are important, but they represent the vast minority of the ways we can show up for each other and participate in society. My first recommendation is for you to assume you have a role to play. That’s it. Just think to yourself, “I’m partially responsible for what’s going on in my community, and for changing it.” Taking personal ownership in your mind is a step toward claiming some of that power which is supposed to belong to the people.

Another recommendation is to align your participation with what you’re good at or interested in. If you hate plants and soil – first of all, that’s really sad – but if you hate plants and soil maybe don’t start your participation by joining the community garden. If you’re into sports, start or join a local league. If you’re good at throwing events, volunteer for the events committee of a local organization. Showing up and participating isn’t about becoming a different person; it’s about bringing who you are to the community you’re part of.

CB: How can we design systems so that people feel like they can use their power, another of How to Citizen’s pillars?

BT: We can start by stopping the rhetoric that says there are “powerful people” and “powerless people.” While it’s true that we have massive concentrations of wealth and certain types of influence in our world, I think it’s destructive for us to internalize this notion that some of us have power and others don’t. One of the most important lessons I learned in making this podcast was from Eric Liu at Citizen University who reminded me that we all have power, in many forms, and we can shift it, generate it, build it. Any system redesign should be premised on the people being literate in our own power and its different forms: gathering, sharing ideas, spending money, paying attention, just to name a few.

A simple exercise I recommend is to ask yourself: how do I have power? Then consider it in different contexts from the very personal to the most global. You might realize you have financial power in every purchase and with your decision of where to bank. You might realize you have moral power when you work with others to boycott an organization. You might realize you have cultural power when you get your company to change its language around hiring or that you have modest physical power when you work with neighbors to dig out someone’s car from the snow.

We must design systems to make power visible, mapping the flows of money, influence, people, and we must design them to remind people that we have the power to change all these. After all, we created them.

CB: What does a BIPOC perspective on designing participation show us?

BT: What comes to mind is that in the history of the U.S., it’s often excluded Black people who have rallied to make this country live up to its documented ideals. By some measures, we appeared to be powerless, not even considered human, and yet we generated power collectively to overthrow a monstrous system of exploitation and violence and pull the country (and all its inhabitants including white ones) toward something more just. As we reckon with the magnitude of the climate crisis, we are realizing that the regenerative agricultural practices of Indigenous people we displaced and tried to destroy are essential to our collective survival. Those are a few historical perspectives on BIPOC participation in a system.

CB: How can you prevent participation burnout?

BT: This is connected to your previous question. I also think we can learn from BIPOC folks that the design of participation in a civic system needs to be joyful, positive, and encouraging, not simply obligatory or fear-based. I think of the songs, dances, cookouts that have been part of various movements for liberation. We don’t get people to act merely by threat, by reminding them of all the terrible things that will happen if they don’t act. That can work, but it’s not sustainable, and it’s not enjoyable. I think about the emails and text messages I get from the Democratic Party, and it’s horrible. They are universally threatening and desperate in tone. They are hostage-taking in spirit. It’s like someone in the Democratic Party saw the National Lampoon cover which said “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll kill this dog,” and
built an entire fundraising ecosystem on that premise. If I don’t give three dollars, America is going to die. This is a fast track to burnout. We prevent burnout by offering diverse ways to participate just like a trainer helps us work different muscle groups. We prevent burnout by building in rest because no one can run hard all the time. And we prevent burnout by designing the participation in a way that makes people feel good so they actually want to participate.

CB: Do you consider yourself a storyteller? How would you describe the role of storytellers in our community?

BT: Yes I do. Storytellers make sense of reality for us. We translate. We explain. We help process emotions. Most of what we experience in life isn’t raw, tangible, reality. We experience a story of reality. We read about it. See it on a screen. Hear someone tell us about it. And we trust those narrators so much we build our lives around their stories. Those stories are things like “the U.S. dollar has value” and “Black men are violent” and “rich people have more value than poor people.” Reality is largely a set of collective stories we’ve bought into. So much of the division we’re experiencing in the world is a battle of stories. That’s a bit destabilizing on one hand, but it’s also empowering because we can craft new stories and draw people into them and create new realities that serve our collective well-being better than the stories we inherited.

CB: You’ve spoken about how you created How to Citizen—why did you choose a podcast as your storytelling medium?

BT: To be honest, I chose podcasting because no one I pitched in the television world would make the show. Podcasting was initially plan B. Then I remembered what I loved about audio in general and podcasting in particular. It’s an intimate medium that creates a one on one connection between the show and the listener. It’s a form of story we can experience while we do other things like laundry and walking and commuting. It’s high resolution enough to create an emotional bond yet low resolution enough to leave something to the listener’s imagination, namely the image. For How To Citizen, podcasting has been a perfect launch pad. It’s a book that doesn’t have to end, and it’s one we can co-author with our listeners.

CB: How would you describe the role of designers in shaping communities?

BT: Designers have a lot of power in shaping communities. They can determine the literal physical constraints of life, how we move about our shared spaces, how much light we have access to. This is true of virtual communities just as much. Designers can drop us into an abyss or create experiences that welcome us lovingly into community. A designer’s powers can be used for good or ill depending on how well the designer works with the community they are trying to shape. Is that shaping consensual or imposed by the needs of a few? Is that shaping open to change after the community has had experience in it?

CB: How can we design our education system to better teach people how to citizen?

BT: Oh there are books on this I haven’t even heard of, but I’ve seen some things I think can help. I’m on the board of an organization called BUILD.org which uses entrepreneurship to help overlooked and underestimated kids engage with their educations. It’s communal and participatory and dynamic. Kids we arrest and deport and fear come up with their own businesses, work together to figure out the product, marketing, and financials. They build skills and community. It’s beautiful to see kids we consider liabilities start to see themselves as assets. There are many programs that do some version of this. But our educational system overall does not. BUILD should be the default, not a special program. We need to teach our kids (and ourselves) power.

We need to design education in a way that has the students shaping the curriculum and practicing what they are learning. But to do that we have to actually want to teach people how to citizen. That’s a big assumption in your question. When I see states restricting voting, restricting books, restricting history lessons, restricting the acknowledgment of our LGBTQ+ neighbors, I see people afraid of a world in which the people really do have the power. They are so afraid of losing the story they were raised on, they will deny a new story that could work even better for them and others. So to better teach how to citizen, we have to let go of that fear of the new story.

Photo by Mathieu Young