Design Museum Magazine: Design in Government - Fall 2022 - Issue 023

Design in Government Policy Prototypes Page 30

Magazine

Fall 2022 Issue 023 US $20

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Closing the Gap

How to Citizen

User Experience and Policy Design

Interview with Baratunde Thurston

Page 18

Page 24

The Difference Government Design Makes in People’s Lives Page 58

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MISSION

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Bring the transformative power of design everywhere.

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Contents.

DEPARTMENTS 4

Contributors

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From the Editor

8 Recommendations 10 Q&A

FEATURES 12

SOCIAL IMPACT

A Unifying Vision

By Candace Brooks, Senior Design Researcher, Agncy

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CIVIC INNOVATION

Closing the gap between user experience and policy design

By Cecilia Muñoz, Senior Advisor, New America & Nikki Zeichner, Product Director, New America’s New Practice Lab

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CIVIC INNOVATION

How to Citizen Interview with Baratunde Thurston, Creator & Host, How to Citizen Interviewed by Claire-Solène Becka, Operations Coordinator Design Museum Everywhere

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CIVIC INNOVATION Touchpoint

Policy Prototypes How designers and policy practitioners can use prototypes to get feedback and iterate on policy

Program

By Angelica Quicksey, Head of Public Design Incubator, New_ Public & Chris Meierling, Director of Experience Design, Medable

Have a great design impact story? editor@designmuseumfoundation.org 2

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FRONT COVER ILLUSTRATION BY SAM AQUILLANO • PHOTO: LOUIS VELAZQUEZ

Fall 2022 • Issue 023

Design in Government

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CIVIC INNOVATION

Designing the Courts A Conversation with Lauren Mattioli, Department of Political Science, Boston University Interviewed by Cyd Harrell, User Researcher

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CIVIC INNOVATION

Our government is designed; design it to be better

By Anne Petersen, design leader Edited by Michi Trota

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PROFILE

Dance Diplomat, Dana Tai Soon Burgess

By Claire-Solène Becka, Operations Coordinator Design Museum Everywhere

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CIVIC INNOVATION

The difference that government design makes in the lives of people

By Dana Chisnell, Civic & Policy Designer

DESIGN MUSEUM MAGAZINE ISSUE 023 FALL 2022 (ISSN 2573-9204) IS PUBLISHED QUARTERLY BY DESIGN MUSEUM EVERYWHERE, PO BOX #9188 25 NEW CHARDON STREET LOBBY, BOSTON, MA 02114. POSTMASTER: SEND ADDRESS CHANGES TO DESIGN MUSEUM EVERYWHERE, PO BOX #9188 25 NEW CHARDON STREET LOBBY, BOSTON, MA 02114.

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Contributors.

Sam Aquillano Sam is an entrepreneur and business designer. He began his career in industrial design at Bose, where he earned the Red Dot Design award in 2008. In 2009 he founded Design Museum Everywhere, a unique, nomadic museum with the mission to bring the transformative power of design everywhere. Sam hosts Inside Front Cover, a limitedseries podcast about the book he’s writing on creative entrepreneurship. In 2020 Graphic Design USA named him one of their 20 Responsible Designers to Watch. Currently, Sam is a Senior Strategic Designer at Edward Jones.

Claire-Solène Becka Claire-Solène is the Operations Coordinator at Design Museum Everywhere. Originally from Washington, D.C., Claire-Solène graduated with a B.A. in American Studies with concentrations in English and Political Science from Boston University.

Candace Brooks Candace is a designer, strategist and facilitator dedicated to understanding and ultimately dismantling inequitable systems and structures across the U.S.

Dana Chisnell Dana is a pioneer and thought leader in civic design, bringing deep experience to that space.

After working with banks, insurance companies, and tech companies for decades to improve experiences for their customers and workers, Dana takes that knowledge to the government space. She has applied this work in dozens of states, and in the U.S. federal government as a policy designer at the U.S. Digital Service in the White House. In 2019, Dana was named one of the world’s most influential people in digital government by Apolitical.

Cyd Harrell Cyd is a UX researcher and product manager focusing on public interest technology. Since 2012, Cyd has worked to improve experiences for the public with the Center for Civic Design, Code for America, 18F (the federal General Service Administration’s internal technology consultancy) and the Judicial Council of California. She is the author of A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide, an onboarding guide and survival manual for tech people joining public sector work.

Lauren Mattioli Lauren joined the Boston University Political Science department in 2018. She attended graduate school at Princeton University and was previously a predoctoral fellow at Emory University. Her research and teaching interests are focused on the institutions of American government, with particular emphasis on inter-branch relations and gender politics.

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Chris Meierling Chris is currently Director of Experience Design at Medable, where he leads multidisciplinary teams to reimagine clinical research for patients and healthcare organizations. Previously he consulted state and federal government agencies at Nava PBC, piloted new social services at Tipping Point Community–a Bay Area philanthropic organization, and helped organizations adopt human centered design practices while at IDEO and IDEO.org. His approach blends service design, real-world testing, and capacity building to effectively partner with experts and produce tangible outcomes.

Cecilia Muñoz Cecilia is a Senior Advisor at New America and the former Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council under President Obama. She's a lifelong policy maker and advocate.

Anne Petersen For nearly 20 years, Anne has worked across service design, strategy, change management, user experience design and research, digital governance, knowledge management, and content strategy. They have served as director or other senior leadership at digital agencies and consultancies, within the federal government at 18F, and in higher education institutions like Penn State and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Currently, they work to improve the experience of interacting with government by creating technical products and services iteratively, in the open, in a just and human-centered way.

Angelica Quicksey Angelica is a service designer with a background in public policy and urban planning.

As a Design Manager at Nava, she works to improve service delivery and advance digital transformation in government at the federal, state, and local levels. She serves on the Board of Technologists for the Public Good and spends her free time outside near her home in Seattle.

Baratunde Thurston Baratunde holds space for hard and complex conversations with his blend of humor, wisdom, and compassion. Baratunde is an Emmy-nominated host who has worked for The Onion, produced for The Daily Show, advised the Obama White House, and wrote the New York Times bestseller How To Be Black. He’s the creator and host of How To Citizen with Baratunde which Apple named one of its favorite podcasts of 2020. He’s also a founding partner of the new media startup Puck and is host of the forthcoming America Outdoors with Baratunde Thurston airing on PBS.

Nikki Zeichner Nikki leads teams in designing government services and products. She used to work as an attorney helping low income clients navigate government programs.

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From the Editor.

Democracy is a Design Problem I didn’t grow up expecting to work in government, especially in the U.S. federal government. Working in government was for other people. I don’t know who I thought those people were, but I didn’t know any of them.

But here I am, now in my twentieth-something year of working with and in government.

Here’s where my story starts: there I was, minding my own business, watching the presidential election returns come back from Florida in 2000. I saw news reports of people leaving the polling place saying that they thought they voted for someone they didn’t intend to. And I thought, that’s a design problem. I wonder how elections get done? At first, it was a hobby. I am a design researcher, so learning what goes into the administration of elections was just a way to follow my curiosity. Soon I found myself on a citizens’ advisory committee in the county where I lived. Then I was lucky to work on some seminal research projects that contributed to ballot design, ballot instructions, and voting system standards. And then one day in 2013, my brilliant, occasional research partner and I formed the Center for Civic Design, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that voters can vote the way they intend, by design.

Our tagline, “democracy is a design problem,” says everything about this issue of Design Museum Magazine.

To say that I am excited about this government-themed issue is a bit of an understatement. After my hobbyist beginnings, I’ve become kind of a civic design nerd. My hope is that, when you read these articles by people who are among some of the most design-progressive folks working in policy, tech, media, and political science, that you feel the same optimism that I do. Yes, it often feels like the world is falling apart, but 6

here is proof that there are good people doing good, human-centered work, and it’s making a positive difference in the lives of regular people every day.

Government is irreplaceable. It should also be available, accessible, and should serve the public by meeting people where they are. A constant challenge is the gap between the people who are making policy and the people who are most affected by government policies.

Cecilia Muñoz and Nikki Zeichner give us their brilliant insights about when policymakers connect ideas with real outcomes for real people (or don’t). One way to close that gap, according to Angelica Quicksey and Chris Meierling, is through prototyping policy as a way to explore implementing programs before they roll out at scale.

Government works best when it is held accountable. That accountability shows up in a number of ways. In this issue, we have a riveting conversation between Lauren Mattioli and Cyd Harrell about how court systems (in all the meanings of “system”) are designed, including deeply rooted and problematic racism, classism, and sexism. And, from the point of view of the public and actions that regular people can take every day, we’ll hear in another conversation between Baratunde Thurston and Claire-Solène Bečka about how design intersects with the ideas he brings to his inspiring podcast, How to Citizen. (I personally love the idea of “citizen” as a verb.)

Claire-Solène brings us more intersectionality with her profile with Dana Tai Soon Burgess of dance diplomacy, where the ideas of identity and history come together to connect culture and belonging as a device of statecraft.

But design in government is different from design in the private sector. Anne Petersen brings that alive with a simple assertion:

Government is designed. We can design it better. Designing government better and designing a better government includes engaging communities as we design public services, to, as Ayana Pressley says, bring people in the most pain closest to the power.

Candace Brooks explores the power dynamic in human-centered design in ways that will have you rethinking your own design practice and how to make it truly community-centered.

Finally, I asked government designers about what makes their work both challenging and awesome. I came away with a few observations about the types of problems government designers work on and why solving them is so different from their private sector experience.

I hope when you read this issue that you feel empowered to make your own corner of the world a better place, by design. But mostly, I hope you find yourself ready to join the growing legion of user experience, product, service, transdisciplinary, curriculum, information, data visualization, policy, and other designers in your local, state, or federal government.

Because democracy is a design problem. • Dana Chisnell Civic and Policy Designer Board Member, Design Museum Everywhere

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Recommendations.

Social Design Insights Podcast

Future Ethics

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.

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.”

Eric Corey Freed Principal, Director of Sustainability CannonDesign BOARD MEMBER

George White Principal Orange Octopus BOARD MEMBER

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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 COUNCIL MEMBER

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

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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?

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, politicalterm 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.”

José dos Santos Head of Design Americas Signify COUNCIL MEMBER

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 justiceoriented 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?”

Jennifer Rittner Assistant Professor Parsons School of Design COUNCIL MEMBER

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”

Shagufta Hakeem Interdisciplinary Researcher

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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.”

Erin Narloch Founder PastForward COUNCIL MEMBER

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.”

George White Principal Orange Octopus BOARD MEMBER

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SOCIAL IMPACT

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).”

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.

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 ILLUSTRATION: FRANZI DRAWS

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SET A VISION

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Boston’s graduates are keenly curious and deeply hopeful.

They know that the way things are isn’t the only way they could be, and they know they have the power—and the responsibility—to make things better, for themselves and for others.

Our college, career & life readiness definition

Able to set goals. Curious. Confident. Hopeful. Sense of agency.

Life is made of journeys big and small. We know that the world we are preparing our children for is fast-changing and that the paths they will travel are still emerging.

To succeed, they’ll need the power to find goals worth seeking, to figure out how to reach them — and to adapt as the world changes around them. And so we build in our students the power to navigate new situations and the skills that will enable them to move through any barriers they find along the way.

CHOOSE A COURSE Boston’s graduates build plans that account for the realities of their situation. They know their own strengths and weaknesses and can assess those of others; they can get the job done. They can read the context that surrounds them, choose a wise course through it, and stick with their plan when things get hard.

Assess and reflect. Plan and persist. Practice self-regulation. Read the landscape. Take initiative.

WORK WITH OTHERS

BUILD COMPETENCE

Boston’s graduates bring out the best in others, and do some of their best work through collaboration. They listen to what others say, hear what they mean, and tune in to what they feel. They build on other people’s ideas and communicate their own, by argument and by story.

Boston’s graduates have the academic knowledge it takes to do high-quality intellectual work, the technical skills required to practice their craft, and the practical competencies they need to take care of themselves as they make their way through the day-to-day. They know how to learn what they don’t already know; they’re confident in their power to grow and make change around them.

Boston’s graduates can assess what’s really going on around them and adapt their plans as needed when their situation changes.

Grounded in their self and community, they are able to keep trying when things get hard, and work their way through the problems they encounter—both the clear-cut and the ambiguous—with imagination and rigor.

CHANGE COURSE

Ability to find and ask for help. Collaboration skills. Communication skills. Empathy. Service and responsibility to others.

Ability to learn. Ability to self-assess. Academic foundation.

Financial, media, and technology literacy. Technical skills.

Able to navigate situations, analyze, and adapt. Comfortable in ambiguity. Comfortable with change. Give and take feedback. Resilient.

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

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.

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 14

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 to work towards creating a device that would people like himself to enjoy sports and the make the conditions and context of his new outdoors as much as anyone else. Phillips reality work for him, not against him. He believed that “invention is almost always just didn’t need a prosthesis that would look like arranging things in a new way.”1 His early or even function the same as a human leg. prosthetic designs were made to replicate He could instead create something that was a human leg and foot wearing a shoe. He built for speed, agility, and comfort. Finally, self-tested every prototype—using them for Phillips turned to nature for inspiration. Using EVERY hiking, STUDENT IN playing BOSTON SHOULD GRADUATE SCHOOL FULLY PREPARED TO FURTHER THEIR EDUCATION AND ACHIEVE on the running, tennis, youHIGH name biomimicry of the fastest land mammal SUCCESS IN LIFE AS THEY DEFINE IT. To do this, they will need to gain new skills, build knowledge and learn how to navigate it—butobstacles eventually, each one failed. He kept planet, he studied how the leg of a cheetah with the help of teachers, counselors, out-of-school leaders, and caregivers alongside them. These are the elements that the vision of athe leg he had lost, until tryingreflect to recreate works as a spring: compressing and flexing to he realized he had the opportunity to design propel the animal forward while running. This something better. model from nature was the perfect mechanism, This was a paradigm shift. Phillips began and—combined with materials that were

BOSTON GRADUATE:

BUILD KNOWLEDGE TO BE READY FOR COLLEGE, CAREER, & LIFE Boston’s graduates have the academic knowledge to understand our world. They can do challenging academic work and see how it applies beyond the classroom. They connect their learning to topics and problems that matter to them and their communities. They use practical money, technology and media skills to navigate systems.

UNDERSTAND SELF AND OTHERS TO NURTURE RELATIONSHIPS Boston’s graduates know they need a variety of healthy relationships. They can figure out who is in their corner and build their network of mentors, supporters and friends. They understand themselves and how people impact each other and their communities. They see relationships as a give and take; they can advocate for their needs and also be accountable to others to work through challenging situations.

ADAPT THROUGH CHANGES AND CHALLENGES TO THRIVE Boston’s graduates know that progress isn’t usually a straight line. They see that skill and confidence come with practice, patience and persistence. Their sense of purpose gives them the flexibility to persist or adjust when change happens. They know that strength is needed to work through set-backs. They can develop and adapt a plan on their own, sifting through feedback and reflecting on personal goals to decide how to proceed.

VALUE DIVERSITY TO HARNESS THE STRENGTHS OF CULTURES AND COMMUNITIES Boston’s graduates value the diversity of our communities and cultures. They find strength in their own identities and value what others bring. They know that differences in race, ethnicity, language, ability and culture are assets.

These skills and attitudes help graduates to navigate complex systems. They see how systems are set up to help some succeed and hold others back; they also see how collective strengths, including their own, can challenge these inequities.

ARE LIFELONG LEARNERS WHO CONTINUE TO GROW AND EXPLORE Boston’s graduates have a set of flexible skills to serve them in a range of career and community roles.

They know how and why to continue to learn. They reflect on their own strengths, experiences and strategies to make sense of issues and spark new ideas. Their curiosity and creativity push them to question facts and feelings. They continue to grow by connecting ideas and sources.

The current draft of the Boston Public School's Voice of the Graduate (2022) 15

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.

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

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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. 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 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

for 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-partsvan-phillips

2.

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

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Civilla, a Detroit-based nonprofit, worked on a human-centered redesign of the City’s 40 page application for public benefits. The process resulted in a streamlined application that was 80% shorter and could be processed in nearly half the time.

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CIVIC INNOVATION

Closing the gap between user experience & policy design.

By Cecilia Muñoz, Senior Advisor, New America & Nikki Zeichner, Product Director and Civic Technologist Ask the average American to use a government system, whether it’s for a simple task like replacing a Social Security Card or a complicated process like filing taxes, and you’re likely to be met with groans of dismay. We all know that government processes are cumbersome and frustrating; we have grown used to the government struggling to deliver even basic services.

Unacceptable as the situation is, fixing government processes is a difficult task. Behind every exhausting government application form or eligibility screener lurks a complex policy that ultimately leads to what Atlantic staff writer Anne Lowrey calls the time tax, “a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them.”

Policies are complex, in part because they each represent many voices. The people who we call policymakers are key actors in governments and elected officials at every level from city councils to the U.S. Congress.

As they seek to solve public problems like child poverty or improving economic mobility, they

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consult with experts at government agencies, researchers in academia, and advocates working directly with affected communities.

They also hear from lobbyists from affected industries. They consider current events and public sentiments. All of these voices and variables, representing different and sometimes conflicting interests, contribute to the policies that become law. And as a result, laws reflect a complex mix of objectives. After a new law is in place, relevant government agencies are responsible for implementing them by creating new programs and services to carry them out. Complex policies then get translated into complex processes and experiences for members of the public. They become long application forms, unclear directions, and too often, barriers that keep people from accessing a benefit.

Policymakers and advocates typically declare victory when a new policy is signed into law; if they think about the implementation details at all, that work mostly happens after the ink is dry. While these policy actors may have deep expertise in a given issue area, or deep understanding of affected communities,

Is there a way to simplify this without hurting the people?”

– 2022 interview with a Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) provider on the topic of filing taxes PHOTO: MARISOL DORANTES

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they often lack experience designing services in a way that will be easy for the public to navigate.

Often this is the case also with those at government agencies tasked with translating policies into programs that will serve the public, though this is changing. For example, when San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors passed an emergency multi-agency program enabling local restaurants to expand operations to outdoor public spaces, many struggling restaurants couldn’t get through the application process. “Their intentions were in the right place but each of the agencies involved had different responsibilities and none of them were centered on the business owner or the user,” a City employee who had worked on this project recalled. They explained that when the program initially rolled out, business owners struggled to understand how to answer the questions in the permit application form.

“The regulations themselves are really unclear because so many different departments have jurisdiction over this space. The Municipal Transportation Agency (MTA) has certain rules. Fire has certain rules. Public Works has certain rules. The Planning department has certain rules. When we interviewed business owners, they said that understanding the guidance was much harder than the form itself.”

This is why many of the policies written to provide benefits don’t end up actually reaching the people they were intended to serve. Consider the complexity of tax filing: most people in the U.S., regardless of income, pay for tax preparers or commercial software to file taxes every year. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS), recognizing this problem, funds free access to tax preparation services through the Volunteer Income Tax Assistance (VITA) program. But even after decades of offering this help, as of 2018 only 3% of the 100 million families eligible for free tax assistance actually used the service. The IRS also sought to make free online tax preparation available for low income individuals through a public-private partnership called the Free File Program.

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However, people had trouble finding and accessing it. The tax prep companies, which had hoped to lure new customers out of this service, stopped offering free online filing services altogether, leaving the IRS and millions of low income filers in the lurch.

Other well-intentioned policies have similar barriers to impact: states with paid leave policies, for example, rarely reach even half of the eligible population. The Unemployment Insurance systems in many states notoriously buckled when they were most needed for workers who lost jobs during the pandemic.

“The process was crazy. It was a full-time job for a number of weeks…” said one engineer of his experience applying for unemployment.

He was interviewed in a joint study of the lived experience of applying for benefits during the pandemic to make the pain visible to lawmakers, who were debating the size of the benefit, but who were less focused on the experience of users accessing it in the summer of 2020.

Gaining traction in government Getting a new policy passed is a lot of work— this alone is reason to celebrate when a president or governor signs a new law. But when a policy gets passed the actual victory is not the law itself, but its impact on people’s lives. Someone needs to be involved in the early stages of policymaking who brings deep expertise in designing services that are simple to interact with. People’s lives can depend on it. Tara McGuinness, founder of New America's New Practice Lab and her co-author Hana Schank, in their book Power to the Public, make this case: Economists and statisticians are pretty good at answering questions like How much will it cost the government to pay for this? or How many families could be eligible? But the current tools are not particularly useful for understanding the needs of a population, nor are they helpful in assessing in real time whether a policy is working the way it was intended.

Those who know how to design and deliver

products and services that are easy for people to use are moving closer to the policy table organically. Code for America, a nonprofit organization founded in 2010, has played a key role in making the case for improving the user experience of government programs. It’s been almost a decade since digital services teams like 18F and the US Digital Service (USDS) began doing the same by giving federal agencies easier access to user experience design services (these teams were born of the national crisis around Healthcare.gov).

There are numerous examples of civic-minded companies serving the public sector like Nava, Adhoc, and Skylight. Delivery efforts at the state and city level are expanding as well, including numerous state digital services from Georgia to New Jersey and Colorado. These teams are demonstrating that public services need not force people to jump through hoops to access what they’re eligible for.

Federal agencies have been increasingly focused on user experience design as well. One impactful example is the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice’s partnership with 18F to develop an easy, online process for the public to submit civil rights complaints, simplifying a process that was previously difficult to navigate. And the Government Accountability Office (GAO), known as the “congressional watchdog,” recently issued a report on the IRS’s Free File program, in which it calls for the IRS to incorporate “experience improvements” to improve its delivery and its reach. Code for America has introduced a framework for delivery and policy teams to work in partnership. Georgetown’s Beeck Center recently published an assessment tool to help policy makers understand how to think about social impact during the policymaking process. Our colleagues at New America have also written about this topic.

The idea of policy making and user experience design as interdependent partners has continued to gain traction, particularly after the pandemic highlighted the broken infrastructure of many social safety net programs. At the tail end of 2021, the White

House issued an Executive Order calling for agencies to put people at the center of their services. The language in this order references digital design methods as ways to strengthen democracy, narrowing the distinction between policy making and delivery implementation; between the substance of laws and the way that people experience them. “The Federal Government must design and deliver services in a manner that people of all abilities can navigate. We must use technology to modernize government and implement services that are simple to use, accessible, equitable, protective, transparent, and responsive for all people of the United States,” President Biden said when introducing this EO. In April the Wall Street Journal reported that teams would look not just at government programs but also look at “life experiences” examining key moments like approaching retirement, recovering from a disaster or giving birth to a child.

A two way street These are hopeful signs of progress, but there is much room for improving how policy gets made in the first place. Bridging the gap between policy and user experience design goes two ways: while policy makers are beginning to bring user experience design closer to their practice, user experience designers are also beginning to learn how to effectively present their work for policy audiences. “That’s a big part of the practice that we've had to build,” says Lena Selzer, one of the founders of Civilla, a Detroit-based nonprofit committed to transforming publicserving institutions through human-centered design. Civilla is best known for having redesigned Michigan’s benefits application form, which had been the longest in the country before their work. “Researchers and designers who work in complex institutions have to learn how to negotiate between what users need and the very real constraints of the institution, the funding and policy requirements,” she explains. We see this too in our own work with the New Practice Lab, a small non-profit policy and delivery startup 21

housed inside New America, that works to move these delivery learnings upstream so policymakers can see the lived experiences of those using policies. A key part of this practice is user research, which happens in partnership with government and nonprofit teams that seek to make safety net programs more accessible. Part of the challenge is to translate design insights into formats and language that are most useful for policy makers. If we create personas and journey maps as part of our process, for example, would policy makers want to see them? Or would it be more helpful to offer guidance in a form that policymakers are more accustomed to, like a bulleted list of our takeaways and recommendations for action? There’s still work to be done to translate the language of design and delivery into the language of policy making.

Today, there’s a distance between policy being made and policy reaching people. By closing this gap, we can strengthen what government delivers, and hopefully the trust that people place in their government. Better still, we might someday live in a world in which there are as many trained designers making policy as there are economists; combining long-term economic analysis with a nuts and bolts understanding of how people live and how they access what’s available to them. This is entirely achievable, and there is a growing field of skilled delivery practitioners, many of who think of themselves as public interest technologists, beginning to have an impact on how policy lands. The federal government and a number of states and cities are getting better at deploying them to tackle cumbersome bureaucracies from food assistance, to taxes, to COVID tests. We can get there, but first we must stop thinking of the user experience as a separate stage of policymaking. A functional democracy requires good laws that actually work to serve the public. The path there is not easy, but it begins with bridging the gap between policy makers and policy users. We have seen this approach succeed time and again: we just need more of it. •

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By closing this gap, we can strengthen what government delivers, and hopefully the trust that people place in their government.

In April 2022, the Federal Government launched a new initiative to design public services around the needs that people have during select life experiences. This initiative was adopted to improve Federal service delivery and customer experience. Visit performance.gov to learn more.

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CIVIC INNOVATION

How to Citizen.

Interview with Baratunde Thurston, Creator & Host, How to Citizen Interviewed By Claire-Solène Becka, Operations Coordinator, Design Museum Everywhere

Baratunde Thurston is an Emmynominated, 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

PHOTO: ERIK CARTER

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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 26

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 fearbased. 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

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. 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.

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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 28

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.

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?

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

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: MATHIEU YOUNG

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Touchpoint

Program

ss e c Pro

Policies create the frameworks and rules for government programs. People don't experience a policy until it is delivered through a program, process, or touchpoint.

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CIVIC INNOVATION

Policy Prototypes.

How designers and policy practitioners can use prototypes to get feedback and iterate on policy

By Angelica Quicksey, Head of Public Spaces Incubator, New_ Public & Chris Meierling, Director of Experience Design, Medable As designers, we cheer every time we see a government agency embrace the principles and practices of human-centered design. Humancentered design incorporates feedback from the people you’re designing for throughout the design process so you can build unified, clear, and respectful products and services. When making policy decisions for laws, regulations, or program operations, human-centered design practices like prototyping can help you test your assumptions early on to create better outcomes.

In our experience, prototyping is an underexplored and under-utilized approach in the public sector. While building robust feedback loops into policy and program development practices will develop stronger policies, government agencies tend to be risk-averse and rely on ideas that maintain the status quo.

Prototyping pushes them to be more expansive and test ideas that might not work. But prototyping actually reduces risk. It reveals new opportunities for improvements and success that can’t be surfaced by doing things the way they’ve always been done.

Narrowing the gap Prototypes are most commonly used while building software. Atlassian—a company that makes collaborative software for agile development teams—defines a prototype as "an early sample, model, or release of a product built to test a concept or process or to act as a thing to be replicated or learned from." In an agile development process, a prototype is a working

piece of code that developers deploy in a matter of days or weeks. This allows developers to get feedback fast.

In the policy world, the feedback loop is much slower. Years may pass between when a policy is first created and when the public and civil servants experience the impacts of that policy.

Because policy decisions are made based on the available data—data that can be years old or incomplete—assumptions are unavoidably baked into the development of any policy. The world can change significantly between when an idea is conceived and when it is deployed. The assumptions that get cemented into a program early in the process may no longer be relevant.

Prototyping allows us to get feedback more quickly, so assumptions can be tested and policy decisions can be made based on up-to-date, relevant data about what people actually need.

Applying prototyping to policy We define a prototype as an object, device, or experience that proves or disproves an assumption. A prototype should involve setting up a team to learn and iterate on their policy or the execution of that policy. Policy prototypes are tangible artifacts or experiences that make a policy real for people and allow policy-makers to test their assumptions and iterate based on what they learn.

Policies create the frameworks and rules for government programs. People don't experience a policy until it is delivered through a program, process, or touchpoint. From Medicaid ILLUSTRATIONS: SAM AQUILLANO

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health insurance (a program), to applying for affordable housing (a process), to a letter from a student loan provider (a touchpoint), policies are just words on a page until they're delivered to the people they are meant to serve. There are three types of prototypes we'll be discussing: 1. Program prototypes: A government program is a large set of related activities with a particular long-term aim, supported by a local, state, or federal government.

Program prototypes let you test and iterate on core program components. This helps you refine and adapt program models toward their intended outcomes, rather than simply the approval or discontinuation of a program.

2. Process prototypes: A process is a sequence of steps to accomplish a task, like the process to register to vote or apply for a benefit. Often processes are part of larger programs and can be represented as a "customer journey." Process prototypes test the steps in sequence and consider all the parties involved. They can reduce pain points, drive greater efficiency, or increase access.

3. Touchpoint prototypes: Each interaction with a government service or office can be considered a touchpoint, from a single email to a conversation with the agent at your local Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV).

Touchpoint prototypes are designed to test and improve specific artifacts or moments of interaction through which people engage with your policy, program, or process.

Policy-makers can create prototypes of programs, processes, and touchpoints before they’re embedded in our everyday lives.

Testing and improving Many policies result in programs—a large set of related activities with a particular longterm aim, supported by a local, state, or federal government. Examples of programs range from federal workforce development programs from the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) policy that distribute resources to states and counties, to city-based housing access programs like San Francisco’s affordable 32

housing program, DAHLIA. A program prototype allows public servants, government officials, philanthropic funders, and the people directly impacted by programs to iterate—to test and improve—on these large, complex initiatives. Iterating helps build better services and inform policy-making upstream.

Policymakers are likely familiar with the idea of launching a "pilot program," a scaled back version of a larger program that either succeeds or fails. (Though they are often expected to succeed.) By contrast, prototypes are even smaller experiments, on limited feature sets, with faster feedback loops, and opportunities for improvement. Failure of a prototype does not mean program failure; it's merely an opportunity to adapt the prototype (and program) based on the feedback gained, and try again.

Given the scale, complexity, and impact of programs, program prototypes are often a collection of many, smaller prototypes: a coordinated effort of small, quick tests and iterations that support larger decisions about what a program or policy should look like. Program prototypes minimize risk by identifying potential failures or hazards early on, so the decision-makers can make adaptations before spending vast resources.

Getting feedback From procurement and contracting processes to applying for public benefits, civil servants and the public alike engage with the government’s most important functions through processes.

A process is a sequence of steps taken to accomplish a task, like the process to apply for public benefits or the process to write and issue a request for proposal (RFP). Often, processes are part of larger programs. Process prototypes can help designers and policy-makers isolate and refine the processes that crosscut their work so that they more effectively and consistently deliver on their intended outcomes.

A process prototype simulates the sequence of procedures and transactions needed to fulfill a policy goal. Process prototypes test and refine all the steps in sequence with the

Program prototyping in action in California

When California passed SB 1004 in 2019, legislators laid the groundwork for five counties to experiment with new solutions to divert young adults convicted of nonviolent crimes out of the adult justice system and toward more community-based and restorative supports.

In response to this opportunity, Fresh Lifelines for Youth, a county juvenile probation department, and a local philanthropic organization coordinated research and design work to iterate on a new program model for young adults. This collaborative design process brought together youth and probation department staff to inform and refine a program. It culminated in a 13-week program prototype made up of experiential learning activities such as classroom-based learning sessions and pro-social activities that emphasize knowledge of the law and self efficacy.

The program prototyping process was shorter and less costly than a traditional pilot, and prioritized learning for the purpose of program refinement and advocacy over statistically significant evaluation metrics.

Within a short time frame, the program prototype resulted in promising indicators like gains in social-emotional learning skills and sustained youth participation. The prototype also showed that classroom-based learning alone didn’t satisfy the range of needs youth have during reentry. This opened up opportunities to incorporate more pro-social activities in the program model, invest in case management capacity to complement classes, and implement greater county and service provider coordination.

These successes and learnings paved the way for additional county and philanthropic funding and the opportunity to scale services to three more Bay Area counties. As new juvenile justice legislation emerged from the next legislative cycle, the initial program prototype and later full-scale pilots provided important learnings for California’s ongoing juvenile justice policy efforts. Stakeholder engagement, advocacy based on early outcomes, and incorporation of youth voice were all critical to creating a strong feedback loop between people's experience with the program and policy makers.

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Simplifying a process by removing a redundant form

Nava prototyped a new process with the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) and updated an 85-year-old-policy along the way.

Nava designers had observed a key pain point in the process where Veterans appeal decisions made about their benefits. Inaccurate data and significant delays due to missing paperwork arose at the moment when paperwork was transferred from one VA organization to another, much of which could be traced to a single paper form, Form 8.

Alongside VA partners, Nava first prototyped a digital version of Form 8 which caused the rate of missing documents to drop dramatically—from 40 percent to 2 percent— but the data discrepancies did not change.

While this first prototype improved the process, it didn’t fix the problem entirely.

So, Nava went back to interview VA staff.

By examining the whole data intake and 34

review process, they discovered that the data collected in Form 8 existed elsewhere and the VA staff had to reconcile the discrepancies in the data between two legacy systems. Nava's designers developed a second prototype that would automatically surface discrepancies to VA staff, reducing the time they spent filling out the forms and reducing the rate of data discrepancies. Ultimately, prototyping proved that Form 8 wasn’t necessary and it was removed from regulations.

In this instance, the prototypes did exactly what they should do: test assumptions and enable the team to make process changes.

And they delivered better end results: a more accurate process that saves VA staff time.

Creating multiple prototypes isn’t a sign of failure. Creating multiple prototypes lets you iterate—refine and test a process multiple times—until you achieve the desired goals.

actual people involved. By refining processes with a process prototype, civil servants and designers can improve the experience for all the people who use the process, create better program outcomes, and increase trust with the institutions that shepherd those processes.

Testing a process prototype can come through simulations, dry-runs, and walk-throughs to play out unexpected scenarios. (Government folks may be familiar with the term “table-top exercise.”) Just as software development teams dedicate days to looking for places where code will break, administrators should dedicate time to identify overlooked process points.

Testing specific artifacts or moments When people interact with your policy, they do so through a collection of interactions or artifacts. Each interaction or artifact is a touchpoint. A touchpoint prototype can be as simple as the language in a letter or a new application form. It’s an opportunity to make changes at these moments, test the results of those changes, and make an improvement.

For example, many cities have adopted Vision Zero as a policy goal, aiming to reduce traffic fatalities and severe injuries to zero.

Cities might create new street signs, introduce fines or new driving rules, or promote changes to large vehicles to make them safer. In this example, a sign is a touchpoint. The moment when a speeding driver pays a hefty fine is also a touchpoint. Both present opportunities for prototyping.

Touchpoints have even smaller scopes than program or process prototypes. Narrow in on one specific artifact or moment that you want to test and what you want to learn from it. Your touchpoint prototype should be narrow enough that you don't have to iterate on a whole process or program.

But because your touchpoint is likely part of a larger program or process, think about it in that context. What you learn may influence other parts of the program. For example, if your new street sign doesn’t reduce injuries, you may need to try different placements or different signs altogether. So, plan to share

your learnings widely early and connect with others who might benefit from them.

Best practices Understanding best practices and emerging opportunities can help you determine when to use a prototype, who to include in the process, and how to make plans that lead to improved programs, processes, and touchpoints. Avoiding a few common pitfalls will help you roll out initiatives with respect for the public and partners and get the right kind of feedback so your efforts are more successful. As you begin prototyping to test your ideas and assumptions, also consider emerging opportunities to go beyond digital.

Applying best practices • Understand the policy and organizational landscape before moving forward with a prototype. There may be larger or contributing issues that you aren't aware of yet. Speaking with people throughout the agency you're working with will reveal pain points to address. In the case of process prototypes, you can conduct a process audit across your agency to identify the business processes that have the greatest impact on the people who use or rely on them. An audit will help you identify which processes are in most need of change.

• Partner and align internally to execute prototypes. Even after you understand the landscape, it is challenging to advance change without allies and champions who are directly involved with implementing programs. These very individuals will create the critical mass for implementing new programs, processes, or touchpoints later on.

• Identify your learning goals early.

Prototyping is about learning. If you created a new artifact, but you didn’t learn anything from it, it wasn't a prototype. Identify the specific qualitative or quantitative indicators that your prototype is meant to impact. In some cases, your learning goal may simply be to understand if you're moving in the right direction—ie. if your artifact is the right type 35

of artifact at all. Get a baseline measurement of those indicators so you can compare the before and after. You can also co-create prototype indicators with stakeholders to ensure you gather data that matters to policymakers and public administrators and is tied to program outcomes.

• Partner with a policy expert. The policy landscape around any particular issue can change rapidly and impact how policy recommendations are perceived. Working with a policy analyst or researcher can provide valuable ongoing context for framing the recommendations that result from a prototype. If you move toward implementation, a policy expert can help connect with the champions or critics of a particular type of program or process to unblock development.

• Implement changes with a small group first and expand incrementally. Starting with a smaller group means that you initially impact fewer people and can make changes more quickly. At each stage in the roll out, you can continue to collect feedback and iterate on the process.

Avoiding common pitfalls • Your prototype should have a potential path to permanence. A prototype is a promise; if you're making something to be thrown away, you're breaking that promise. Your users implicitly trust that you are using their time well and that their input matters. So, though you may abandon a prototype, you shouldn't test an idea with users that has no potential to become permanent—especially if you are testing an artifact that impacts a vulnerable community. While new barriers can always arise in government, an ethical and effective approach to prototyping considers known barriers in advance.

• Prototypes don't have to be perfect to get feedback. It’s easy to feel like you need the most polished, high-fidelity version of something in order to get feedback. Though it may seem counterintuitive, this is often not the case. Especially for early feedback, it can 36

be better to test a rough version of an artifact, process, or program design. This is not only because it's cheaper, but also because people are more willing to give feedback about something that is clearly not finished.

• Consider potential causes of failure in advance. There are many barriers a policy might encounter: a program design could have already been considered, the population served by the prototype isn’t representative, or certain circumstances might not be replicable in other contexts. Policymakers can forecast potential pitfalls beforehand by imagining the program has already failed and then thinking through what might have caused it to fail. This strategy is called running a premortem. It can be a helpful step for programs that hope to influence policy because you can address the pitfalls your team identifies before implementation begins.

• Be aware of shifting policy priorities and budgets. Interest in specific programs or policy priorities can rise and fall alongside the legislative cycle or changes in government administrations. Additionally, funds and attention can shift based on changing philanthropic priorities or interests from newly appointed public officials. Consider the timing of your recommendations and think long term about when they might be most influential, as new, and perhaps more relevant, policy advocacy opportunities open in future cycles. Anticipating events like elections, setting target dates to demonstrate outcomes, and building cross-organizational coalitions are all ways to mitigate dwindling support.

• Focus on outcomes, not outputs. Prototypes might be measured against outputs like number of calls answered or applications reviewed. But these outputs don’t necessarily measure the quality of service provided to a user. The number of customer problems resolved or the rate of error-free applications may be more valuable measures. Understand the difference so you can focus on improving prototype outcomes and, ultimately, program outcomes.

Keep an eye on emerging opportunities • Prototyping isn't all about digital. It's valuable (and increasingly common) to test nondigital programs, processes, or touchpoints.

These can include paper communications, like fliers and letters about health insurance enrollment, or in-person interactions, like when a couple applies for a marriage license at City Hall.

• Use demonstration sites to imagine a future where a policy has already been implemented. Demonstration sites are local sites that serve as a “laboratory” to identify and solve problems that may arise during program implementation. San Francisco’s Safe Injection Demonstration Site sought to do just this. Like paper prototypes, the demonstration site was designed to quickly build empathy for the public’s experience within community and policy stakeholder groups. When paired with campaigns and long-term advocacy, demonstration sites can influence the framing and scope of policies.

• Agile delivery methods are being adopted in government. Agile practices—where teams build and release a product incrementally and incorporate feedback along the way— are often part of digital transformation initiatives. They allow agencies to take an iterative approach to improvement, strategically moving toward larger goals.

• Prototyping outside traditional administrative departments can create a safe space for failure. City-based innovation teams (e.g. San Francisco’s Office of Civic Innovation or Boston's Office of New Urban Mechanics) can be more open to experimenting and allowing governments to incubate new ideas before pushing them to more traditional agencies. Philanthropies and new funding streams (e.g. the CARES act) can also offer opportunities for experimentation, incubation, and scaling with long-term sponsorship and dedicated financial resources.

At their core, policy prototypes get user feedback more quickly, and, in the long term, can ensure policy design choices meet their

Reducing paperwork barriers with a touchpoint prototype For Vermonters applying for public benefits, providing eligibility verification documents used to be a time-consuming process that required sending documents by mail or physically bringing them to state facilities.

When a Nava team began working with the State of Vermont on integrating their enrollment and eligibility processes, the team's early research showed that document verification was a common—and time consuming—touchpoint across all 37 health care and financial benefit programs that the Vermont Agency of Human Services (AHS) administers.

Recognizing this as a high-value touchpoint to improve for Vermonters and the State, Nava quickly developed a prototype uploader tool that was tested with 50 Vermonters per month. With Vermonter feedback, the team was then able to iteratively introduce new features and also create more robust processes and training that supported staff in integrating the uploader into their program’s operations for all.

Rather than attempt a large-scale benefit application redesign, improving one touchpoint that cross-cut multiple programs provided the unique opportunity to improve how Vermonters interact with State services.

It became one part of a modular platform that helped the state continue modernizing and integrating healthcare and financial benefits.

Introducing the document uploader drove a 44 percent decrease in the days to eligibility determination for Economic Services clients who needed to provide verification documents.

intended outcomes. They help practitioners test their assumptions and see how business processes and agency-public interactions come together before committing a large resource investment into policy implementation. The learning that results from every iteration is a powerful input to future efforts and ensures policy goals are fulfilled. • 37

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CIVIC INNOVATION

Designing the Courts.

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 PHOTO: JACKIE HOPE

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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 40

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

Columns at the U.S. Supreme Court, Washington D.C.

JESSE COLLINS

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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. 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).

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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 43

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 44

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.

Small scale design changes can be effective for relieving acute human misery, which can create space in a community to pursue larger, lasting reforms.

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/40067495Martin 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

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Fog highlights the dome of the Wisconsin State Capitol building.

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CIVIC INNOVATION

Our government is designed; design it to be better.

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

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.

PHOTO: ANNE PETERSEN

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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 48

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,

A hand-colored lithograph called “People's Choice Twelfth President.”

Artist: Nathaniel Currier, 1848.

IMAGE CC0 COURTESY OF THE NATIONAL PORTRAIT GALLERY, SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION

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

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 50

PHOTO: ANNE PETERSEN

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.

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

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.

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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 timeconstraints. 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 termlimited 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 52

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, Washington, D.C. PHOTO: ANNE PETERSEN

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PROFILE

Dance Diplomat, Dana Tai Soon Burgess.

By Claire-Solène Becka, Operations Coordinator, Design Museum Everywhere

Dance is not often thought of as political, at least not dangerously so. But in 1992, detectives arrested Peruivian dancer Maritza Garrido Lecca for sheltering ​​Abimael Guzmán, the guerrilla leader of the Shining Path, a Maoist terrorist group in Peru, above her ballet school. This was the political–and artistic–context that Dana Tai Soon Burgess and his dance company were sent into as dance diplomats for the US State Department in the early 2000s. Dana Tai Soon Burgess grew up in New Mexico to artist parents: his father, an American painter, and his mother, a Korean textile artist. His identity as a gay Korean American growing up in a Hispanic community led him to see movement as his– and humanity’s–fundamental language.

To Dana, dance can serve as a bridge to understand others regardless of their cultural backgrounds. However, this multicultural environment also left Dana feeling constantly like an outsider. Now, Dana is drawn to diplomatic work because it appeals to these childhood lessons. He is constantly searching for the place he belongs, and loves interacting with artists abroad, discovering their commonalities, and helping each other grow through this universal language.

Dana first got involved with the State Department in the early 1990s, when a State Department official was in the audience at one of Dana’s performances at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. This official liked Dana’s profile, his work, and his background, and felt he might be a good fit for work in Panama,

Venezuela, and other South American countries. He also has toured in Cambodia, Canada, China, Korea, Indonesia, Jordan, Egypt, Israel, Pakistan, and Suriname. Dana also works as the Choreographer-in-Residence at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery, works as the Artistic Director of his eponymous company, teaches at George Washington University, and recently, writes and edits books, including his memoir coming out in September 2022, Chino and the Dance of the Butterfly, and hosts the Slant Podcast.

Dana was invited to visit Peru through a State Department Performing Arts Initiative grant and Envoy program to create new work and set existing repertory on the National Ballet of Peru. After this initial trip, Dana returned with his company to do a national tour of his work, and then continued to regularly visit Peru, thanks to two Fulbrights and multiple State Department requests. While in Peru, Dana teaches at universities, tours his own work, choreographs for the National Ballet, and sets choreography regularly for the Ballet San Marcos. This former relationship is reciprocal: the National Ballet has been invited to the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., and is a long lasting example of cultural diplomacy.

This work is primarily about friendship building, albeit highly designed friendships, and continued contact, conversations, and exchanges are required in order to form these lasting relationships. Initiated by the US government, Dana has become an integral figure in Peruvian dance culture, and 55

is featured in dance history books in Peru.

Diplomacy is designed, and dance diplomacy is no different. Imagine the transformation from the State Department's point of view– Peruvian dance at first associated with communist militant groups, and now in a true friendship with an American modern dance company.

Another notably fraught trip of Dana’s was his two-week tour in Pakistan in 1999 in collaboration with photographer Sueraya Shaheen. The two were invited by the Pakistani Cultural Council and the U.S. State Department to create a new choreography and photo exhibition to be presented at the Kennedy Center as a result of the tour. At this time, the Taliban was not well known outside of Pakistan, and the two governments hoped this tour might encourage friendship between the nations. Dana had his own goals too, as he set out to investigate pre-Islamic Buddhist sites to inform his understanding of how Western aesthetics shaped physical representations of the previously symbolic depictions of the Buddha. While visiting the Swat Valley, Dana visited a museum that had been shut down due to a recent Taliban raid; many of the carvings of the Buddha had been attacked and broken as the Taliban saw them as “sacrilegious idols.” Dana then met with a local official, who made it known that he scorned Buddhist art. In addition to the Swat Valley, Dana also visited the Lahore Fortress, and met with the US Embassy community and the cultural arm of the Pakistani Government.

These meetings left Dana at times feeling isolated and anxious; reflective of the political climate at the time in Pakistan. Still, these diplomatic visits were mutually beneficial, and Dana walked away with a new understanding of freedom and self-expression.

Dance diplomacy, and this kind of friendship building, is not a new concept.

Ballet was particularly popular during the Cold War as a tool of national expression and pride, especially given the importance of ballet in Russia. Dance performances at this time demonstrated artistic freedom and 56

JEFF MALET

JEFF MALET

JEFFREY WATTS

JEFFREY WATTS

JEFF MALET

physical excellence of both American and Soviet culture: think of the technical virtuosity of Russian Vaganova-trained dancers and of the triumphant Balanchine style in Stars and Stripes. Dance tours, out of all the cultural diplomacy options, now are arranged based on the involved community’s interest: in essence, if dance is particularly significant or respected, an American dance company is often selected to tour. For example, Dana shared that in Indonesia, dance is revered and there are often huge dance festivals where American participants are welcomed and valued. A dance tour might also be selected if the cultural attaché of a region has a personal interest in dance. Dana explained that dance is more complicated to tour than other art forms as it has so many requirements: a stage, or at least a proper floor to dance on, for example.

Dana notes the complexity of accepting and declining tour offers. There have been times when Dana has had to refuse assignments, especially when the safety of his dancers is not guaranteed. Dana spoke of one invitation to participate in a festival, but upon further research, learned that there were major safety issues, and that housing wasn’t ensured upon their arrival. This research is key before a trip, not only to vet the logistics, but to understand the community and host organizations.

Dana, as a diplomatic figure, is representative of a more intersectional branch of this work than its Cold War history, and he thinks carefully about how the government designs cultural diplomacy– and how to improve it. The scale of this kind of diplomacy is determined by the yearly program budget release, and soft diplomacy is seen as a relatively low cost, high visibility option. Dana believes there is room for improvement in the design of these programs, especially in regards to who is sent out on tour, what art forms and styles are represented, and what conversations about American identity are being had. He also advocates for more of an emphasis on what happens after the return of a tour, and how to design multi-step projects and reciprocal programs so that collaboration happens on American terrain as well as abroad. • 57

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CIVIC INNOVATION

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

I see the difference that design makes in the lives of the people I serve every single day, in both large and small ways. 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.

PHOTO: RYOJI IWATA

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

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 60

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.

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,

"

Working in design in government is “the most punk rock job you could ever ask for.”

— Julia Schamburg

Illustration showing wait times for participants in a research study, March - June 2020 61

"

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

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.

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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?)

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.

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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.

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"

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.

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. •

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

1.

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

Listening to speeches during a naturalization ceremony at the Boston Federal Courthouse on July 4, 2015 65

Thank You Supporters.

DESIGN IMPACT SOCIETY TRANSFORMATIONAL IMPACT

EDUCATIONAL IMPACT

Matt Rightmire

Dieter & Karen Korellis Reuther IN MEMORY OF Harriet Korellis

INSPIRATIONAL IMPACT Mary Darmstaetter Betsy Goodrich Blake Goodwin David & Felice Silverman

COMMUNITY IMPACT Deb Aldrich Sam & Wendy Aquillano Richard Banfield Ben Beck & Stephanie Howard Donna Bovi Jon Campbell & Heather Reavey Lisa deBettencourt Sarah Drew Laura Dye Eric Corey Freed Lois Goodell David Hacin Ann Hudner Lisa Killaby Matt Kirchman Bernard Lebow Dave Madson

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Kathy McMahon & Robert Brown Nancy & Craig Miller John Moorhead Ioana Pieleanu Alexandra Reese Linda Rodts Joe Rondinelli Denise Rush Richard L. & Virginia Q. Rundell Leslie Saul Sara Sigel Glenn Sundin & Matthew Bacon Janet Swaysland Cheryl Tougias Burt Visnick Amy Winterowd Ron Zalkind & Karin Sharav-Zalkind

PARTNERS PLATINUM

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Elkus Manfredi Architects FCAT - Fidelity Center for Applied Technology PA Consulting

CENTRL Office Coforma DLR Group DuaneMorris, LLP EYP iRobot Nimble Design Co. Red Thread + Steelcase Stantec Tarkett

SILVER Bora Architects Boston College BRIC Architecture Dyer Brown Architects Fresco Design Gensler JE Dunn KPMG Mad*Pow MassArt Northeastern University Payette Sasaki Silverman Trykowski Associates Visnick & Caulfield Architecture & Design Workhuman

BRONZE Hacin + Associates MentorWorks Signify Studio Troika Umpqua Bank

FOUNDATIONS & GRANTS Barr Foundation Bloomberg Philanthropies Boston Cultural Council Boston Society of Architects Foundation Cambridge Community Foundation Klarman Family Foundation Lovett-Woodsum Family Foundation The Malka Fund Massachusetts Cultural Council National Endowment for the Arts Oregon Community Foundation Regional Arts & Cultural Council Sappi: Ideas that Matter 67

COUNCIL Meghan Allen Jonathan Anderson Judith Anderson Kyla Astley Joe Baldwin Corinne Barthelemy Scott Berkun Aidan Borer Debra Brodsky Tracy Brower Amy Bucher Alfred Byun Megan Campbell Jess Charlap Lisa deBettencourt José Dos Santos Sarah Drew Lewis Epstein Jessica Finch Renae Geraci Adam Gesuero Ross Guntert Sara Hartmann Ryann Hoffman Lauren Jezienicki Jessica Klay Emily Klein David Lemus Jessie McGuire Sascha Mombartz 68

Cia Mooney Kate Murphy Erin Narloch Hilary Olson Pam Pease Anne Petersen Dave Pitcher Ravi Rao Tom Remmers Jennifer Rittner Karen Robichaud Cheri Ruane Chokdee Rutirasiri Susan Ryder Nedret Sahin Jamie Scheu Jonelle Simunich Melissa Steach Janet Stephenson Emma Stone Shannon Sullivan Julie Taraska Shawn Torkelson Jodi Vautrin Dan Vlahos Cathy Wissink Angela Yeh

BROOKL INE , MA

SM A L L • A G IL E • W O R T H Y REST-DESIGN.COM A GR APHIC DESIGN PR AC T ICE FOCUSED ON BR ANDING & SPAT I AL DESIGN

GEORGE RESTREPO PROPR IE T OR • CRE AT I V E DIREC T OR

We craft creative solutions and build technology products that improve the communities served by our partners.

We work closely with government to shape the services that people rely on. Together, we co-create progress by leveraging our agile, human-centered approach to improving digital services to help people live happier, healthier lives. Our collaboration with government has helped improve healthcare, health IT, Veterans services, immigration, and access to equity and justice.

Coforma is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business (SDVOSB) and 8(a) Small Disadvantaged Business with access to GSA MAS 070, 8(a) STARS Ill, and VA CEDAR contract vehicles.

Let’s make something that matters.

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