4 things I’d love to collaborate with communities

As I'm looking for new opportunities, I have been thinking how lucky I have been to work on a diverse set of projects in the public sector. I have come to appreciate the unique needs of this space: the pressure communities and local municipalities are under, the inflexibility of contracting and appropriations, the difficulty of engaging a broad range of residents, and the time scale needed to have deep impact in your community. 

This is hard stuff. As a designer, finding ways to engage with your community while honoring, respecting, and understanding all the work done before your intervention, and what will happen after you leave, is a design problem in itself. 

There have been some early successes: helping the New York Civil Liberties Union activate a city-wide, nontraditional campaign centered on listening, or designing a new way for LA residents to give feedback to City Hall by going directly to the residents with a mobile listening pop-up at a community college jobs fair, or supporting local governments and non-profits in reimagining their civic commons, or creating a temporary installation for AARP to better understand the needs of city practitioners. These projects I worked on are a start, and I have been thinking of what adjacent problem I’ve seen which should be invested in.

I made a huge list. It's an endless list, and I had to down select (please know there is more to do than the list below). These are the topics I would redesign if I had a magic wand to collaborate with different public sector agencies, the private sector, and most importantly the community of residents who live there:

Redesign Engagement

Engaging the community in both participatory design, but also channeling how to engage, has been a particular area of study for me. Many of my recent project’s goals were to engage communities who don’t get a seat at the table. Our existing public sector-to-resident engagement model is broken. Not everyone can make time for a 5-7pm meeting at the local community center, and those who do are generally white and wealthy, and the full community isn’t always empowered. 

How might we redesign engagement so that those who have limited time, attention, and means be part of the community dialog?

How might we also redesign community feedback so that it informs experts and executives, but doesn’t paralyze a community to act? What is the “do no harm” rule for public engagement?

Redesign Safety

Policing in America has a very complex, and often troubled past, present, and if we don’t design a better system, a troubled future. Currently there is a large group of residents who are feeling the weight of policing on their community, the police feel under-siege, and municipalities are often stuck in neutral. I am both sympathetic to the defund police movement, and the more technocratic redirect movement. My hunch is that the solution is localized to their community.

How might we redesign safety, so that the populace at large are safe, individuals and cohorts aren’t unfairly targeted, the police get the training they need?

How might municipalities empower both communities and those who deliver life safety in new ways? How do we get everyone to the tablet to negotiate and design a new system? Who ultimately decides what's best?

Rethinking Contracting

Contracts – those legally binding agreements which outline what governments are purchasing and what companies are providing – should be simple, right? They almost never are. When governments are purchasing cubic yards of concrete, or a bridge, maybe it’s simple. But how do you price innovation? While at IDEO we’ve tried many ways to give clarity to public contracting officers for a process with outcomes are hard to guess at the beginning. Being deliverable based works most of the time, but for more open-ended project needs, it’s more complicated.

How might we create the clarity of a contract with the flexibility to iterate, better mirroring the design process?

How do we give the public confidence that the money was well spent, and that there is value received. How do we create a two way street: clear value proposition for government, and more flexibility to respond to people's needs?

Redesign neighborhood development

Neighborhoods are amazing: the best have clarity about who lives there, who it serves, and are responsive to those who live in the neighborhood and open to those who are visiting. Often neighborhoods are built by developers with a vision which isn’t aligned with the larger community. There is a difference between Rockefeller Center and Hudson Yards.

How might we create new tools for neighborhood (re)building, which empowers those who don’t have deep wells of money? 

How do we empower developers to build what the community needs, not just what a finance sheet pencils-out? How do we design for those who live in communities, but might now own property?

Let's do it it together!

If anything in this list resonates, let's talk. I'm in the job market looking for opportunities around civic engagement, designing elegant solutions to gnarly issues, and supporting our community residents through public and private services.

Or if there's anything you think I missed, please put your dream project in the comments below.