Civic Design
What is civic design?
Designing with people, not just for them
There is a question that is almost never asked in rooms where public policies, digital platforms, or institutional services are designed: who is at the table when deciding what the solution will look like?
Most of the time, the people who are going to use it are not there. There is a technical team, a timeline, a budget, and many good intentions. The result is procedures that no one understands, platforms that people abandon halfway through, and programs that were designed for a community, but never with it.
Civic design was born, in part, to correct that.
The problem with designing "for" people
Designing for someone (instead of with someone) starts from a dangerous assumption: that the person designing understands the problem better than those who live it every day. That assumption is rarely true, and when repeated at scale, it has real consequences.
Sasha Costanza-Chock documents this with concrete examples in Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need (MIT Press, 2020). One of the book's most cited examples is almost uncomfortably simple: automatic soap dispensers that do not recognize dark skin because they were calibrated and tested, almost always without malice, using only one skin type as a reference. No one sat down to decide to exclude anyone. But the design, without intending to, did exclude.
That is the central idea of Design Justice: design distributes benefits and burdens among different groups, whether we like it or not. The question is not whether a design has a social impact, but upon whom that impact falls and who participated in deciding it.
Civic design: the definition we use at Cívica
At Cívica, we understand civic design as a discipline that combines research, service design, and facilitation to solve complex public problems. It is not just another methodology to "make things look pretty." It is a way of making decisions about public matters that starts with three steps:
Research with rigor. Before proposing, thoroughly understand the context, the people, and the systems they are in. Not superficial surveys: real understanding.
Design with method. Turn those findings into services and strategies that work in real life, not just in a presentation.
Facilitate change. Build the consensus and capacities necessary so that the solution is actually implemented, not left in a PDF.
In three years, this approach has allowed us to work with governments, international organizations, NGOs, and businesses in the region, and accompany processes that have directly impacted more than 500 people. We don't say this to show off a number: we say it because every single one of those people participated in the design of something they later had to use, comply with, or live through.
An uncomfortable question (also for us)
It would be easy to write this article as if civic design were a resolved formula. It is not. Designing with people takes more time than designing for them. It is harder to schedule, harder to present in a single meeting, harder to control. It requires giving up some authorship.
And there is the uncomfortable question worth asking, both inside and outside of Cívica: how many of the decisions we make about public services, digital procedures, or social programs were actually designed with the people who were going to use them, and how many were designed assuming we knew what they needed?
We are not always going to have the right answer. But asking the question already changes the process.
Now what?
Civic design does not resolve inequality or institutional distrust on its own. But it does offer something concrete: a method so that public decisions stop being made behind the backs of those who are going to live them.
That is not a slogan. It is a change of process, of timing, and of who has a voice in the room. And it is, also, an invitation: next time your organization is about to launch a service, a platform, or a policy, it is worth asking, before starting to design, who is missing from that table.
Are you interested in civic design?
Follow us on Instagram and LinkedIn for more reflections like this, or write to us if your organization is facing a public issue that needs to be rethought from a design perspective.
Citation: Costanza-Chock, S. (2020). Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. MIT Press.
