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.

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.