CHANGEMAKERS: Gabriel Mugar on Civic Design and the Benefits of Inefficiency
Gabriel Mugar is a Senior Design Researcher at IDEO, where he specializes in working with communities and organizations to design opportunities for learning and collaboration. His work has spanned a range of contexts, from State and Federal government to consumer technology, and he recently co-authored the book "Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency” with Eric Gordon, published by Oxford University Press. Gabe recently spoke with All Tech is Human’s Andrew Sears about the ethical challenges in public-sector innovation, the role of design in fostering civic trust, and other timely topics.
Andrew: You’re a Senior Design Researcher at IDEO. What role does design research play in creating ethical products and systems?
Gabe: So much to unpack with this question! First we can start with this question of ethics. What is ethical? In the context of design, I approach the question of ethics from a lens of equity. For example, if we design anything, from a light switch to a financial product, that intentionally helps a portion of the population reach their goals while unintentionally (or intentionally) preventing another portion of the population from reaching their goals, then we’re enabling a world where some people have the means to succeed while others do not. Design enabling a disparity in resources, or inequity, is wrong and therefore unethical.
What does this mean for design research? In any setting, designers create new products and systems based on what they know about the human experience. As a design researcher, my job is to bring those stories of the human experience to the center of the design process. Where ethics in design comes into play for design research then is the question of whose stories are being centered, because the stories we center in the design process will shape for whom a design is intended to advantage.
Where this question of the stories we center in the design process is particularly important is in the phase of recruiting research participants. Because design researchers do not often have a lot of time to hear stories across the bell curve, there has been a focus on looking to the extremes, a concept of looking to settings where people face rare but highly challenging situations that, if designers can address them, will likely mean a wide range of the population will find value in the product or service. This model has worked particularly well when IDEO, for example, was primarily working in the space of industrial design.
However today, as companies like IDEO design systems and experiences, the question of “extreme settings” begins to take on a more invisible form, like institutionalized oppression. Here, recruiting for design research is starting to change. For example, scholars as Sasha Costanza-Chock, in their new book Design Justice, looks to the work of feminst scholar Kimerbly Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality as a way for designers to consider different degrees of oppression that people might occupy (e.g. disabled, queer, and black) and how the layering of oppresed states will reveal unique lived experiences that should be centered in the design process.
For participation in research, design research for ethical tech and products means embracing co-design, or the work of involving research participants in the development of your design concepts. Of course co-design means and looks like very different things for different people. Usually, you can trace the characteristics of co-design along the axis of participant agency, or how much researchers are really letting people in to the design process. In some cases, co-design can be very light touch, asking people to do a one-off dot voting activity, or it can be heavier, engaging people in multiple workshops and conversations over time.
All of this to say that as a design researcher, the aim of creating ethical technologies and systems comes down to being a convenor of stories across a range of perspectives and backgrounds that drive design, with a particular focus on those stories and perspectives that are typically left out of the product and system creation process.
You published Meaningful Inefficiencies earlier this year with Eric Gordon. What inspired this book, and what is the core argument that you make in the book?
Eric Gordon and I were inspired by a convergence of two distinct phenomena. The first was the growing distrust in the United States of legacy institutions that play a key role in mediating the interests of the public, such as newspapers and government. The second was a trend amidst this environment of news and government reimagining their relationship with people through a lens of efficiency. The primary example here being the world of understanding human behavior through large scale data capture through such means as analyzing user behavior online or using sensors to understand movements through an urban landscape. While all of these technologies may provide insight into what people are doing, they are not doing much to rebuild the trust and perceived value of institutions working for the public interest like government and the news.
With this tension in mind and through generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, we conducted interviews across the United States to learn how community based organizations, city governments, and local news organizations were taking new approaches to building trusting relationships with the people they serve.
And what we learned is the core argument of the book: that there are institutions shifting their priorities from delivering a product (e.g. produce a newspaper for consumption) to focusing on convening conversations between the organization and the people they serve. They are not just hearing and extracting learnings about what their needs and concerns are, but are also working to build long lasting trusting relationships that create a new dynamic in which the institutions work with people to care with each other for issues that matter to them.
We describe this work as civic design, where people within government, for example, design for moments that bring people together to explore topics and build new approaches to collaborating around how to take care of their community. We describe this through a framework of Publics (the people who have a shared concern), Play (the mechanisms for convening people and exploring a topic), and Care (the output of the conversations in which people act on an issue that matters). The book is full of case studies that unpack this framework of Publics, Play, and Care, and we provide examples of how designers can bring this into their work.
How/why has the assumption that efficiency is always desirable become so ubiquitous? Can you give some examples of contexts in which this assumption is incorrect?
When it comes to innovation, efficiency has to do with how quickly (and with the least amount of resources) we can move from an idea to a product. That quick movement from idea to action is what creates a competitive advantage, helping companies stay out in front of their rivals with new product offerings. And this approach to rapid cycles of innovation has of course worked well for the private sector and has been a defining feature of the tech industry, so much so that this motto of “move fast and break stuff” has been emulated and admired across multiple sectors. And as Eric and I point out in our chapter on innovation, this logic of efficiency for innovation, while productive for the private sector, misses the mark for the needs of public serving organizations, especially when the goal is rebuilding trust.
For example, in the book we talk about how the goal of innovation in the private sector is often to disrupt the old way of doing things. In some cases, this disruption can alter people’s livelihood. Take the example of Uber, which disrupted the taxi industry and left people without a means to support their family. While cities have scrambled to develop policy to address these disruptions to peoples livelihood due to Uber, the approach of just throwing a new innovation into the mix and fixing problems after the fact just does not work in the civic context.
A tech based example that we highlight in the book is the case of the Student Rights app developed for the Boston Public Schools. This app was designed to help students know their rights if they are facing disciplinary action. This was a revolutionary approach to balancing power so that students could advocate for themselves and, as it was being developed, was met with a great degree of concern from teachers and administrators. A private sector approach to innovation that favors disruption would just throw the app into the mix and leave people scrambling to reimagine how to approach disciplinary processes and potential abuse of the new technology. In a civic design context, the development of the app was a long process of building trust through multiple co-design sessions and meetings to hear out concerns and address them through design. It was about handing over parts of the development process to the school system so that they could feel confident that they would have some ownership of a tool that could effectively change how they do their work. Had the app developers not taken this approach of bringing stakeholders along in the process, the app would not have succeeded in being deployed.
In short, when it comes to building trust in environments where little trust exists, expediting innovation and deployment is not the answer. In such settings, human conversation that hears out the nuance of challenges and lived experience and creates opportunities for ownership of the process and product is the only way that innovation in a civic context can truly be disruptive.
There’s a great line in the introduction to the book: “When groups strive for 'smart cities' or 'smart government,' they are bringing normative assumptions about the values of smart technologies to bear on systems such as urbanism and democracy.” What are some of these normative assumptions, aside from the assumption of efficiency that we’ve already discussed?
I think the big pushback that we have with smart cities is the one-way nature of the technology. Smart city tech is essentially surveillance technology. It helps city managers know (on terms they and the engineers have inscribed in the technology) what people are doing. It does not, however, help people know the city and its processes. Yes, open data portals give people access to what a city knows, but what does that say about how cities use that information? How does that build a relationship between people and city government so that when problems arise or needs attention, people feel confident that their unique lived experience is being accounted for?
Urbanism and democracy rely on conditions that support people’s ability to convene, deliberate, and organize around shared issues. If public serving organizations don’t focus on designing conditions that are essential to urbanism and democracy, then what are they doing?! Civic design is about that work of creating relational dynamics, a conversation, rather than using technology that further escalates an asymmetry of power where the government keeps an eye on people while also keeping them at arm's length.
What are one or two important questions in the realm of civic design that you haven’t yet found satisfying answers to? What sort of work needs to be done to address these challenges?
On one level I think there is a big challenge around the human reflex to jump to proposing a solution to a problem before engaging in the due diligence of unpacking that problem. This is something that I see in both public serving organizations and private sector companies. Innovation methodologies invite us to take time to unpack the problem and explore questions around desirability, viability, and feasibility before we invest time and money into a solution, and yet within these processes we still find ourselves needing to remind everyone to take a beat, slow down, and examine the situation. And taking aside potential for sunk costs if we are wrong about assumptions, there is the issue of trust; if we jump to a conclusion without engaging stakeholders, then it is likely that we won't have the organizational or community buy-in that is essential for deployment and sustainability.
On a fundamental level, another hurdle around the solution-orientedness of human behavior is showing that, in a civic context especially, innovation should not always be oriented towards eliminating a problem. Rather, we should think about how we innovate ways to bring people together in shared exploration and capacity building to organize around tackling a problem. Some might read this and react that this is just bureaucratic “meeting for the sake of meeting” drudgery, and I would argue that what people are missing is that, with civic innovation, the problems are so much more nuanced, complex, and messy than what we innovate around in the private sector. Because of this messiness, problem solving must be more organic, situational, embedded, and emergent.
So how do we address these challenges? For now I think it's about naming the challenges and raising awareness, kind of like what we are doing in this conversation!
You can keep up with Gabe on Twitter and can purchase Meaningful Inefficiencies here.