Innovation

This chapter introduces the concept of civic innovation, which is distinct from the more commonly understood market innovation. Instead of moving quickly and disrupting markets through the introduction of novelties, civic innovators use novelties to change organizational cultures, and build publics around common cause. The chapter introduces four primary activities of civic innovation: network building, holding space, distributing ownership and persistent input. Drawing on two case studies, the Chicago Police Data Project and the Boston Student Rights App, the chapter shows how people are putting these activities into practice and reshaping how innovation happens. The chapter reviews popular conceptualizations of innovation, especially as they emerge from Silicon Valley, and describes why innovating in a civic context comes with different demands.

Care

This chapter examines the concept of care and describes the difference between caring about, caring for and caring with. Caring about is associated with attentiveness, caring for is relational, and caring with is a collective assigning of caring responsibilities, which is deeply connected to democratic values. Care is introduced as the desired outcome of civic design. The chapter includes two case studies from public radio stations in California and Alaska, each of which demonstrates how civic designers within news organizations are pushing back against industry demands for greater efficiency by creating thoughtful, deliberate spaces for cultivating care.

Play

Play is the precondition of civic action taking. This chapter explores what it means when people play and how the creation of trusted, accessible, and inclusive play spaces is central to civic design. Distinct from gamification, civic design looks for games to structure play, creating less, not more, efficiencies in systems. With an extended case study of a project involving the popular augmented reality game Pokémon Go, which invited Boston youth into questioning and changing the game’s data, the chapter explores how play can inform and shape civic life.

Practice

Too often quantifying engagement falls back on using metrics of efficiency that look at the effects of a final product rather than the value of the process that shaped it. This chapter offers an evaluation tool that civic designers can use to talk about the impact of their process. It includes a guide for reflective conversation designed to capture the four activities of civic design: network building, holding space for discussion, distributing ownership and persistent input. Additionally, it includes a self-administered survey that captures one’s progress over time. The evaluation tool was designed in collaboration with seven engagement journalists from the US and Europe. While it was designed specifically to accommodate the needs of civic designers in news organizations, the chapter concludes with exploration of its potential application in different professional contexts.

Introduction

The introduction introduces the concept of civic design and the social context from which it arises. Civic designers are practitioners working within public-serving organizations (government, news, and civil society), many of which are experiencing pressure to adopt new technologies and be responsive to a digital culture. These practitioners are pushing up against pressures to incorporate digital technologies for enhanced efficiency in order to build trust and forge new relationships with a plurality of publics. Each is engaging in the creation of meaningful inefficiencies, which is the intentional design of less efficient over more efficient means of achieving some ends. The introduction describes the conceptual framework surrounding these practices and explains the research methodology. Finally, each of the book’s chapters is introduced.

Publics

This chapter reviews concepts of the public, from Aristotle to Dewey, and challenges singular notions of the public good, which can exclude a wide variety of perspectives and subjectivities. The consideration of publics—how they form and communicate—is introduced as central to the work of civic design. This includes understanding the mass media ecosystem and how small and large groups interact within that larger context. Unlike human-centered design that focuses on the needs of individual users, civic design considers the needs of a plurality of publics and considers the power relations that organize them. A case study of a role playing game in New York’s Participatory Budgeting process is introduced, along with several other examples of civic designers deliberately and thoughtfully cultivating publics.