Reflect and Chart Forward
Bria Alexander
DesignOps Curator
Ariel Kennan
Senior Fellow, Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation
Charlotte Lee
Strategic Lead for CX and Innovation, Granicus
Sarah Brooks
Human Interface Design, Apple
Emily Lessard
Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, Bellweather Agency
Gordon Ross
Vice President and Partner, OXD
Joanne Dong
Life-centred Design, Systems Innovation (Si) Toronto Hub
Summary
Join us to reflect one what we’ve shared and learned over the past three days at this first gathering of the global civic design community. We’ll consider together where our field is headed and our hopes for the future. Come to share your reflections and charge up on how you’ll take what you’ve learned back out into your work and practice.
Key Insights
-
•
Systemic design, ethics, and inclusion underpin the future directions of civic design, weaving through all sessions.
-
•
Governments globally face similar challenges in equitable design, highlighting shared struggles and opportunities.
-
•
Designers must first do internal work, including recognizing their power and biases, before shifting power to communities.
-
•
Inclusive usability testing benefits from compensating diverse community members to participate meaningfully.
-
•
Scaling civic design impact requires understanding structural policies and intervening at systemic levels, as shown by Public Policy Lab's approach.
-
•
Trauma-informed design requires years of investment and challenges designers to avoid re-traumatizing research participants.
-
•
Radical participatory design reframes design as a communal iterative process that redistributes power sustainably.
-
•
There is a paradox in civic design between maintaining expert rigor and democratizing design literacy broadly.
-
•
Future civic design needs to be localized, turning design to serve place-based communities for sustainable impact.
-
•
Ongoing community connection and co-creation via Slack and monthly calls are vital for maintaining momentum post-conference.
Notable Quotes
"Everyone, both speakers and participants, understood the assignment of civic design from day one."
"Our job as civic designers is to bring government needs and community needs into alignment."
"Everything can be designed – ourselves, relationships, processes, policies, systems."
"How do we know how to evaluate radical participatory design? Has there been a sustained shift in power?"
"Future-facing regulatory structures can avoid post-traumatic innovation by anticipating technology’s social impacts."
"Being a positive deviant means confronting challenges with limited resources but innovative, community-based approaches."
"We need to slow down decision-making processes so that ethics and systems thinking scale with project scope."
"The future of civic design will be localized, designed for and by communities rather than dictated top-down."
"Designers must do the internal work of self-awareness and reflection before shifting power to communities."
"Working on a different word than empower: People already have power, we have to respect it."
Or choose a question:
More Videos
"Try to observe the situation like a security camera—stick to factual, objective descriptions."
Joshua GravesWe Need To Talk: Addressing Unmet Expectations (Part 2 of 3)
April 28, 2025
"Screen readers let us jump directly to content, replicating visual skimming of a web page."
Sam ProulxSUS: A System Unusable for Twenty Percent of the Population
June 9, 2021
"The act of naming, organizing, structuring information is itself a foundational design decision plan for the future."
Sean Baker Sara RomanoskiWeaving Knowledge Management into the Fabric of Our Design Practice
September 11, 2025
"Draw your ideas, draw your ideas — it unlocked a skill I never thought I had and made my ideas have more traction."
Mujtaba HameedFrameworks for Excellence: Using Visual Thinking and Communication to Elevate Your Research
March 26, 2024
"This is a journey with no end, and it’s amazing that we can continue the conversation beyond this session."
Husani OakleyTheme Two Intro
June 6, 2023
"Sustainability needs to be the new accessibility in design – a normalization built into every process."
Jamie Beck Alexander Nina Gregg Shawn Petersen Bill DeRoucheyHow can you find your role in climate?
January 17, 2024
"Only one in 10 companies have quantifiable measurement for their design leaders."
Kristin Skinner Kamdyn Moore8 Types of Measures in Design Operations
April 16, 2020
"People get the findings, but they don’t viscerally get it; that’s where video clips make a huge difference."
Prabhas Pokharel Mayo NissenOrder and Chaos: New Ways of Collaborating on Synthesis and Storytelling
March 10, 2022
"Older adults often prioritize connection more than younger individuals, so take time at session starts and ends."
Amanda Kaleta-Kott Lea Martin, PhDThe Joys and Dilemmas of Conducting UX Research with Older Adults
March 11, 2022
