Videoconference: Why Community is Key to Professionalizing Design
Over the last 5 years, design as a profession has become more established in the public sector. What does it mean to professionalize design? And how does community play a part? Jaskiran Kang, Head of Service Design at TPXImpact shares her experience moving into government from the private sector, leading design at the Department for Education, and building community to further design practice.
About our speaker:
Jaskiran Kang is a designer with fifteen years experience working with digital products and services. She’s worked in e-commerce, finance, and now the public sector. She aims to create the right conditions for design to thrive. Building, collaborating and sharing as one strong community. It’s helping each designer, the profession, and the department deliver better outcomes for the people we serve.
Jas is the former head of design at the UK’s Department for Education, responsible for the service and interaction design professions. She is now the Head of Service Design at TPXImpact.
Videoconference: Expand—Rethinking Design for Public Challenges
As the problems facing society are getting thornier by the day, how do we bring design up to speed? Design thinking, as we have come to know it, needs to be rethought and expanded to enable more radical, systemic and long-term solutions. Christian Bason, Ph.D., CEO of the Danish Design Center, shares insights from his new book, “Expand: Stretching the Future by Design”, co-authored with Jens Martin Skibsted, arguing that innovation is in dire need of — innovation.
About our speaker:
Christian Bason, CEO, leads the Danish Design Center (DDC), an independent non-profit foundation. Backed by the Danish government, DDC builds capacity for innovation and sustainable growth by design. Previously, Christian was Director of MindLab, the Danish government’s innovation team, and business manager with the global consultancy Ramboll. Christian is the author of seven books on innovation, design and leadership, including Leading Public Design (2017) and has published in amongst other Harvard Business Review and Stanford Social Innovation Review. He teaches executives at amongst others the Henley MBA, the European School of Administration and Copenhagen Business School. Christian is M.Sc. in political science and Ph.D. in design leadership.
After the call, you’ll be added to our free community and notified of future calls.
Videoconference: Civic Design for the Next Seven Generations—A Discussion on Sacred Civics
In Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities, Jayne Engle and Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook assemble visions for how spirituality and sacred values are essential for reimagining how we live, organize and govern ourselves, determine and distribute wealth, inhabit and design cities, and construct relationships with others and nature. Join us for a discussion with Jayne and Tanya on what it looks like to design for the next seven generations.
Optional: read Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities in print or open access!
About our speakers:
Jayne Engle, Co-Editor and Co-Author, Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities, Co-Director of Participatory Canada
Jayne is committed to system transformations for the long term that are radically inclusive and caring, decolonizing and ennobling. She’s an urbanist, strategist, experimentalist and curator of ecosystems and change processes.
She is the Co-Director of Participatory City Canada (a part of the Participatory City Global ecosystem), a collaborator on the City Experiment Fund in Eastern Europe with UNDP and ALC, and an Adjunct Professor at McGill University School of Urban Planning. She was until recently Director of Communities at the McConnell Foundation, where she curated the Cities & Places Portfolio – philanthropic work that fostered social and civic innovation and infrastructure for equitable and regenerative cities. Jayne has worked for 25 years in philanthropic leadership, city planning and community asset development, urban policy innovation, participatory research and collaborative governance design in the US and across Europe, Canada and the Caribbean.
She holds a PhD in Urban Planning, Policy & Design from McGill University in Montreal; a Master of Urban & Regional Planning from the University of Pittsburgh; and an MBA in real estate development and urban land studies from Temple University in Philadelphia.
Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook, Co-Editor and Co-Author, Sacred Civics: Building Seven Generation Cities; Co-Director of Participatory Canada
Tanya Chung-Tiam-Fook specializes in the areas of climate and ecological resilience, Indigenous knowledges and partnerships, innovation, placekeeping, and health and mental wellness. Working in non-profit, academic, government and grassroots settings across Canada and internationally, Tanya leads research and knowledge co-creation, program and content development, partnerships, strategy and advising as: Co-Director of Participatory Canada with Jayne Engle; and as Director of Research for the Centre for Indigenous Innovation and Technology (CIIT). She has an advisory role as subject specialist on numerous panels and committees.
Tanya holds a PhD in Environmental Studies, postdoctoral fellowships in community climate change adaptation and climate change and Indigenous health, an MA in International Development Studies, and a diploma in psychodynamic psychotherapy. She has many years’ experience as a university lecturer, delivering educational modules and workshops, and presenting her research, publications and thought leadership. Tanya’s Akawaio and mixed ancestry from Guyana and the Netherlands, combined with interdisciplinary and international experiences, enable her to bring intercultural and multifaceted perspectives and sensibilities to her work.
The Unspoken Complexity of “Self-Care” with Deanna Zandt
At the July Civic Design Community call, hear from Deanna Zandt (she/her). The term “self-care” is thrown around a lot these days but there’s a more complicated picture than just taking a bubble bath and hoping for the best. In this call we talk about what’s missing from our conversations about self-care. We also discuss how human experience is fundamentally messy, but designers (and coders) like to make everything clean and neat. We’ve got to start reckoning with that. Our goal is that you walk away with a sense of the care structures that you have and need in your own lives, and a sense of what designing care into our systems could look like.
About our speaker:
Deanna Zandt is a writer, artist and award-winning technologist living in Brooklyn, NY. She spent 15 years working at the forefront of social justice, technology and media; after she burned out for the third time, she realized that maybe that work didn’t suit her particularly well. Currently, she spends her time: supporting other very impressive people and organizations behind-the-scenes with their technology; writing & drawing when she feels like it; walking and playing with her two dogs and their friends; connecting with humans near and far; and figuring out how to exist with meaning, fulfillment and as many giggles as possible. We’ll be talking (and very likely giggling) about her zine that traverses the constellation of self-soothing, self-care, community care and structural care.
Videoconference: Everything You Need to Know about the Civic Design 2022 Call for Presentations
In the May Community call, we talk about all things conference presentation proposals! The Civic Design Call for Presentation (CFP) will be open for submissions until June 1 to present at the conference on November 16th – 18th, 2022.
About our guests:
Rachael Dietkus is a designer, licensed clinical social worker, and certified trauma professional dedicated to trauma-responsive practices in design. She is the founder and principal social worker-design of Social Workers Who Design and works with design teams worldwide.
After a 10-year career working with social justice and human rights non-profits, she earned her MSW in 2010. Rachael worked at Veterans Affairs for nearly seven years, followed by several years in higher education. She has served as an AmeriCorps member, an NGO delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Council. She is currently a Governor-appointed statewide Commissioner with the Serve Illinois Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service.
In 2022, Rachael will be finishing her MFA in Design for Responsible Innovation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on how and why trauma-responsive methods are relevant and needed in design research and practice.
Victor Udoewa
Having started his career in the design and development of computational tools for scientific applications, Victor shifted his focus to the social impact space and Information and Communications Technologies for Development, both community and international development. He is a practitioner and advocate of participatory design, a meta-methodology he’s used in service and system design for governments, multilateral institutions, nonprofits, for-profits, and communities, to facilitate skill-building and improved employment opportunities for community members. Bitten by the “civic-innovation bug” he is now focused on creating or improving government products and services for citizens, immigrants, and refugees.
Victor has a particular love for design, learning, and design education. He advocates bringing practices such as positive deviance, pluriversal methods, and systems practice into civic design. He helps leads an equity-centered meetup group and Justice by Design as part of his work to decolonize design. Outside of work you can find Victor teaching salsa, singing with his a cappella group, volunteering as a health trauma and crisis counselor, or (mostly) hanging out with his family.
Jennifer Strickland is a Senior Human Centered Design, Accessibility Engineer. With a non-traditional path to design and more than 25 years of professional experience in a variety of mediums, Jennifer led product teams and served in nearly every role in the product life cycle. With an intersectional, non-binary identity of a multi-racial ethnicity and invisible disabilities, they experience a lot of exclusion. Prioritizing inclusion, Jennifer aims to ensure no one is excluded from products and services from the beginning. Inclusion as culture, not a feature to be backlogged.
Additionally, Jennifer is an invited expert with the W3C, serves on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group, finalizing WCAG 2.2, drafting WCAG 3.0, and a co-lead of the Structured Content sub-group. They volunteer with a number of organizations such as the U.S. Digital Response, AIGA DC (2021 DotGov Programming Director, IxDA DC (organizer), UXPA DC, and speak on inclusion, accessibility, web performance, and CSS at a variety of events. Jennifer was a speaker for the inaugural Rosenfeld Media Civic Design Conference in December 2021.
Videoconference: Communities of Practice for Civic Design
At the April Civic Design Community call, hear from new community curator Kara Kane. She shares her experience scaling and leading the UK government’s user-centered design (UCD) communities and International Design in Government community while working at the Government Digital Service.
Kara talks about how communities of practice are central to the transformation of public services. The communities she developed built design capability, aimed to create a culture of equity and inclusion and were core to developing and delivering standards and guidance for government.
About our speaker:
Kara Kane is a design leader and community builder whose expertise is in building design culture in large scale organizations. From 2017 to 2020, she was the Community Lead for User-centered Design (UCD) leading the UCD Communities team at the UK’s Government Digital Service. She then brought her community-led approach as a Senior Service Designer working on the government’s Service Standard and Service Manual. In 2017 she co-founded the International Design in Government community with Lou Downe and Martin Jordan, bringing together design-minded public servants from over 70 countries. She recently took a break from government to work at BT (British Telecom) on design ops and the Loop design system. Kara is the newest co-curator of the Rosenfeld Media Civic Design Conference. You can follow Kara on Twitter.
Fireside Chat: How Design Addresses a World on Fire
Please join us at the next Civic Design Community call where you’ll hear from Lesley-Ann Noel, PhD., and Jennifer Strickland, Senior Human Centered Design, Accessibility Engineer.
Jennifer and Lesley-Ann will chat about how they approach equitable design through language, frameworks, tools, methods — and self-care. The conversation will cover how Lesley-Ann created The Designer’s Critical Alphabet, and introduce the new book she contributed to,The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression, & Reflection.
About our guests
Lesley-Ann Noel is an Assistant Professor in the Dept. of Design Studies at North Carolina State University. She has a BA in Industrial Design from the Universidade Federal do Paraná, in Curitiba, Brazil. She has a Master’s in Business Administration from the University of the West Indies in Trinidad and Tobago. She earned her Ph.D. in Design from North Carolina State University in 2018. Before joining North Carolina State University, she was the Associate Director of Design Thinking for Social Impact at Tulane University, and she was a lecturer at Stanford University and the University of the West Indies.
Lesley-Ann practices design through emancipatory, critical, and anti-hegemonic lenses, focusing on equity, social justice, and the experiences of people who are often excluded from design research. Her research also highlights the work of designers outside of Europe and North America as an act of decolonizing design. She also attempts to promote greater critical awareness among designers and design students, introducing critical theory concepts and vocabulary into the design studio e.g. through The Designer’s Critical Alphabet. She is one of the authors of the new book, The Black Experience in Design: Identity, Expression, & Reflection from Allworth Publishing.
Lesley-Ann’s research interests are emancipatory research centered around the perspectives of those who would traditionally be excluded from research, community-led research, design-based learning, and design thinking. She practices primarily in the area of social innovation, education, futures workshops and public health. She is co-Chair of the Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group of the Design Research Society.
Jennifer Strickland is a Senior Human Centered Design, Accessibility Engineer. With a non-traditional path to design and more than 25 years of professional experience in a variety of mediums, Jennifer led product teams and served in nearly every role in the product life cycle. With an intersectional, non-binary identity of a multi-racial ethnicity and invisible disabilities, they experience a lot of exclusion. Prioritizing inclusion, Jennifer aims to ensure no one is excluded from products and services from the beginning. Inclusion as culture, not a feature to be backlogged.
Additionally, Jennifer is an invited expert with the W3C, serves on the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) Working Group, finalizing WCAG 2.2, drafting WCAG 3.0, and a co-lead of the Structured Content sub-group. They volunteer with a number of organizations such as the U.S. Digital Response, AIGA DC (2021 DotGov Programming Director, IxDA DC (organizer), UXPA DC, and speak on inclusion, accessibility, web performance, and CSS at a variety of events. Jennifer was a speaker for the inaugural Rosenfeld Media Civic Design Conference in December 2021.
Designing essential financial services for those in need
Please join us at the next Civic Design Community call where you’ll hear from Alan Williams, VP Design at Propel and Rose Deeb, Senior Content Designer. They’ll walk us through their Providers application and share how they deliver essential financial services and tools to over 5 million families living with limited income who utilize the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Benefits (SNAP) program. The Providers application provides participants in any state with timely, localized updates about changes to benefit allocations, and details about benefits that users may be eligible for but not yet aware of, all in plain language. https://www.joinpropel.com/
About our Speakers
Alan designs products that serve sensitive needs with dignity and ease. He currently serves as the VP of Design at Propel, a fintech that delivers essential financial tools to >5M families living with limited income. For the past seven years, he has worked to improve the experience of American families using means-tested benefits at organizations like Code for America, Civilla, and the Biden-Harris Transition Team.
Rose is a Senior Content Designer by way of library and information science. She has over a decade of experience creating content and design strategies in museums, non-profits, agencies, and product design teams. Rose is a California native but currently lives and works in New York City.
Civic Design in 2022
Fresh off the December conference, let’s join together to chart the year ahead for the Civic Design Community. Together we’ll reflect on key tactics, themes, and areas of inquiry you’re carrying into your practice. We’ll invite everyone to share what you’re working on and how we can support each other and learn together throughout the year.
“Let’s Talk About Data and Crisis”—Public Digital Service Delivery = Open Data + Human Centered Design
The public relies on government services during critical and meaningful events throughout their lives—from birth, travel, education, and healthcare to retirement and death. The global COVID-19 pandemic inevitably impacted these critical functions of our lives, and underscored the need for increased government technology and communications.
Digital platforms have proved to be key and effective agents in delivering critical and urgent information or services in the event of a public crisis, as opposed to physical infrastructure (imagine Dr. Fauci posting a paper bulletin to convey the latest national statistics for COVID-related data!). On the other hand, both private and public entities rallied around open data initiatives to inform critical policy decisions, share information, and work together to develop critical digital infrastructure that provided testing sites, kits, and results (e.g., call centers vs websites; office visits vs telemedicine).
To fully scale solutions such as these, we must first consider how we:
1) Use data to inform our technology in solving problems;
2) Provide assistance in a timely and approachable manner for end users; and
3) How we use data to invest in critical features and to quickly deliver information.
About our guest
Dr. Honey is the Chief Data Scientist of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Executive Director of the HHS “InnovationX” team within the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Health (OASH). Her team tackles complex challenges by harnessing the power of open data, open science, open source, citizen science, crowdsourcing, prizes challenges, and innovative public-private partnerships for public health. Current priorities include improving citizen’s experiences with government services using the novel HHS Health+ (“health plus”) program and other human-centered design methodologies.
Kristen has served the federal government in multiple capacities for eight years. After her AAAS Science & Technology Fellowship at the U.S. Department of Energy, Dr. Honey worked at the White House for three years across two Administrations. Under the Obama Administration (2015 – 2017), she advised the U.S. Chief Technology Officer (CTO) and led Open Data and My Data (data interoperability) from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (2015-2017). Under the Trump Administration (2017 – 2018), she served in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), directing the Open Data portfolio for the Office of the Federal Chief Information Officer until the passage of the foundations for Evidence Based Policy Making Act. Dr. Honey then moved to HHS to advise the HHS CTO and advance the CTO’s digital innovation, human-centered, and partnerships portfolios. During the COVID-19 pandemic response, Dr. Honey served on the COVID-19 Testing and Diagnostics Working Group, managed a 50-person “COVID-19 Diagnostics Informatics” team, and helped HHS establish its new Office of the Chief Data Officer.
Dr. Honey earned her Ph.D. at Stanford University in the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in the Environment and Resources, School of Earth Sciences and her Ph.D. minor in Civil and Environmental Engineering. She also holds an M.A. in Environmental Studies from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a B.A. in Human Biology with Honors from Stanford University.