Ridiculously Hopeful Government Futures
Timing: September 2024 - June 2025
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Challenge: This project, funded by the Digital Harbor Foundation, seeks to motivate greater engagement with HCD in government by co-creating aspirational visions of a California civil service that regularly and easily learns and innovates with people.
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Objectives: We will collaboratively craft a compelling vision of a future in which using HCD and inclusion of customer voices in policy and decision-making is standard practice. Through a series of workshops and consultations, we will develop this vision, along with use cases and prototypes to demonstrate accessible ways for government to listen to and incorporate the voices of real participants.
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Reflections:
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I am very grateful for the expertise and community that Virginia, Judi, and Leah bring to this project. They work directly and creatively with government partners and that sets a much-needed foundation of trust throughout this rather unusual project!
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This project is still ongoing, we are entering the workshop delivery phase. The development of these visions has been joyful in a time of much frustration and disappointment for government workers (end of year 2024, beginning of 2025). While it is always difficult to be hopeful in the face of injustice, fear, and uncertainty… the orientation to imagine a long-term future where our hopes and aspirations have been successful, has proven to be a generative and community-oriented practice.
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Additionally, artificial intelligence is very quickly shifting many ways of working. This project is an attempt to propose visions of emerging technology that are informed by lived-experience. I advocate for everyday users to have a voice in these developments, not just technologists. Experiential Futuring can be a powerful technique to create visions of technological futures that are driven by the people closest to the challenge.
My role: Design Futures Lead, I was responsible for the methodology. I facilitated the creation of shared, participatory, experiential futures.
Partners: Civic Makers (Civic Design Project Lead),
Virginia Hamilton (HCD in Government Content Lead)
Approach
Social Design Dreaming is a method I developed during my PhD work that uses participatory futuring to imaging and prototype ridiculously hopeful visions of a better future.
Our task is to run 5 workshops across California where we immerse government leaders, front-line workers, and partners in these moments from the future.
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Clarify the challenge: Government agencies that administer social safety net programs are hesitant to invest in the use of Human Centered Design.
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Collectively define past, present, and future. What is the weight of the past, the plurality of the present, and the potential of the future?
3. Synthesize the aspirations of the future.
We were surprised by the key themes in this stage: Respect and trust for civil servants and recipients. New ways of working in government: collaboration, dreaming, innovation, flexibility.
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Learning from and with people is systematized, funded, and normalized
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Innovation & trust shape processes and programs
4. Brainstorming scenes from a better future.
When these things are true, what will we see? What are the roles, systems, products, contexts, institutions, celebrations that will show that we are in a better future?
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A future where policy is informed by lived experience.
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A government that is truly co-designing with its constituents.
Clarify moments from a better future.
We developed two distinct scenarios that reflected the hopes and innovations from the brainstorms.
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Future 1: ‘Lived-Experience Intelligence’ Participates in Meetings
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Future 2: Moving from Public Comment to Public Co-Design
Script writing and testing.
We fleshed out the scenarios into two 30-minute immersive experiences. Adding realistic details of government processes, speculative technology to support HCD, and aspirational demonstrations of a future where user voices are common and celebrated.
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Table read. To improve the scripts, we invited collaborators from government and partners to give feedback on the scripts over Zoom.
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Prototyping the immersion. To test out the experience, we invited futures-thinkers, designers, and government partners to come to the Civic Makers office in San Francisco for a 4-hour feedback session. We acted out the scripts and they experienced them as participants. Then our guests gave feedback and helped to redesign the stories to be more fun, engaging, convincing, and futuristic.
Prop-making, story refinement, and logistics.
The task of Experiential Futures is to invite people into a highly realistic depiction of a moment from the future. We are building all of the materials one might see in an HCD-centric government office in the year 2045.
Workshop delivery
Our task is to run 5 workshops across California where we immerse government leaders, front-line workers, and partners in these moments from the future. Then we will ask them to respond and redesign these visions of a better future to reflect what they see as essential and aspirational. This is planned for March and April of 2025.
