New literacies

Every civic technology uses a unique metric to prove its value, but what metrics transcend individual projects? What elements should we measure or employ regardless of the technologies under consideration?

A Measure of Inclusion

By: Erik Schwartz

As digital services evolve, marginalized residents stand to lose the most. Erik Schwartz shows how the UK’s Government Digital Service works to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Articulating our Civic Communication Literacies

By: Andrew Schrock

Civic tech is experiencing a time of unparalleled growth. How might the public become involved in issues that involve both politics and technology? Andrew Schrock has an idea.

Community Building

Open data is not enough. Usable interfaces are not enough. In order to engage citizens as active participants in the co-creation of their government, civic designers must build community and capacity.

Two-way Streets: Forging the Paths Towards Participatory Civic Technology

By: Diana Nucera

How can we make civic technology more participatory? How do we create environments in which it can thrive? Diana Nucera shares insights from her work with the Detroit Digital Justice Coalition.

With and Of and By and For: In Civic Technology, Community is The Platform

By: Greg Bloom

Greg Bloom says the work of civic design begins precisely where O’Reilly’s government as platform ends. He’s begun to think of community itself as the platform.

Election Design Fellowships: Partnerships for Positive Change

By: Jessica Hewitt

AIGA’s Election Design Fellows program was conceived to foster the partnerships necessary to produce well designed election materials. In this article, Jessica Hewitt shares takeaways from the program’s formative years.

Designing complexity

Both private- and public-sector organizations are using design thinking to solve increasingly complex problems. How might they make their design processes more accessible to a wider audience?

Collaboratively Designing Public Services

By: Chelsea Mauldin

Citizens often bear the burden of public services that weren’t designed with their experience in mind. If civic designers are ever going to improve these services, Chelsea Mauldin believes we’ll need to engage both citizens and civil servants alike in their creation.

Design Research: Customer or Citizen?

By: Andrea Moed

Industry vetted user-centered designers making a transition to public sector projects must consider our craft in a new light: relative to government’s traditional means of knowing people. Andrea Moed compares and contrasts the two.

Untangling Complexity: Designing for Shared Understanding

By: Jacqueline Wallace

The next phase of the digital revolution will be defined by products and services that facilitate shared understanding, allowing concerted participation around complex issues. In working to show the way, civic designers will need to call upon the powers of systems research, design research, social science, and open data.

Also in this issue

Citizen User Testing Groups: Hacking Design Research

By: Andrew Maier

The design community has become fairly adept at bringing the perspective of users into the creative process, but that didn’t stop Smart Chicago’s Dan O’Neil from devising a whole new way.

Designing With, Not For

By: Andrew Maier

The second issue of Civic Quarterly asks how designers might better facilitate interactions that are simultaneously more humane and less isolating. Editorial Director Andrew Maier discusses how community is at the heart of what we do.

Civic Quarterly Recommends, Winter 2014

By: The Editors

Feeling overwhelmed? The editors at Civic Quarterly invite you to take our best advice for improving your life, civic or otherwise.

Designing with, not for

Inspired by themes heard during the 2014 Code for America Summit, our second issue asks how designers might better facilitate interactions that are simultaneously more humane and less isolating; interactions that not only meet people where they’re at, but also give citizens a sense of shared purpose.

Read the letter from the editor