The Civic Design Room: Conversations on What It Looks Like To Operationalize Design in Government? With Community, Within Government, and Your Team

Abstract

The Civic Design Room is a podcast and media thesis project that engages designers in the public sector, primarily in the US, on how they have operationalized design methodologies in the public sector. This podcast is a series of thirteen forty-five-minute to one-hour episodes, each featuring a different guest. These guests range from current or former US federal and local government employees to urban planners and designers working in local US governments and researchers based internationally in Colombia, the United Kingdom, and Finland. Each episode covers similar topics of design, politics, and the management skills needed to foster an innovative team in government. This thesis calls for a new mode of design - Caring Systems Design, which seeks to infuse principles of care ethics - attentiveness, responsiveness, competence, and responsibility - throughout the multiple, nested levels of government work - from the individual and team level to cross-departmental collaboration, to engaging with external communities and stakeholders. The project will live on Spotify, and the notes of each episode include supportive materials for those listening. The written thesis represents the breadth of my research, including the methods and processes used to create the podcast, the findings from each podcast, and the implications of my findings and strategies in urban planning and the public sector.