A Community of Civic Designers
Are you a public servant who wants to deliver better services to your community? Or a designer or researcher working in the public sector—or seriously considering it?
Then let's create something together: a new community for civic designers. We'll talk every month, share what we're learning, help each other out, and get together at a new conference—Civic Design 2021 (December 8-10; more about it below).
Ariel Kennan, Sarah Brooks, Martha Dorris, Charlotte Lee, and Lou Rosenfeld (bios below) are the respected team that curates our ongoing conversation about civic design. Rosenfeld Media is producing, just as we do for three other beloved pairs of communities and conferences (Advancing Research, the DesignOps Summit, and Design at Scale).
We hope you will find a home here too, whether you're looking to learn, share ideas, facilitate discussions, or network, and whether you work in or with government entities anywhere in the world—from large (federal and national) to small (municipal and local).
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About Civic Design 2021
Governments—national, regional, and municipal—deliver a mind-boggling array of complex services to users who number in the billions. These services are digitizing
at a rapid pace, while governments themselves face crushing pressures to reduce their budgets and, even, to justify their existence.
Against this backdrop, customer and user experience are emerging as critical to the ability of governments to fulfill their responsibilities. Civic Design 2021 is the first conference to curate the best practices from both government and private sectors, with the goal of enabling anyone who works in—or with—government agencies to deliver better user and customer experiences.
Civic Design 2021 takes place December 8-10, and is produced by Rosenfeld Media. For over 15 years, we've served user experience professionals with the industry's leading books, training, conferences, and communities. We're looking forward to seeing you at Civic Design 2021!
Curators
Ariel Kennan, Lead Curator
Ariel Kennan, Senior Fellow, Beeck Center for Social Impact + Innovation, is a transformative leader versed in service design, digital product development and organizational strategy. She embeds equity and justice in her work and strives to create a world where everyone can prosper.
Sarah Brooks, Associate Curator
Sarah Brooks, IBM Distinguished Designer, is a transformation leader and intrapreneur using mixed-methods research and service design approaches to help teams and organizations reach more equitable, better outcomes. She has worked across enterprise, federal, non-profit, start-up, and hybrid organizations.
Martha Dorris, Associate Curator
Martha Dorris, Founder and CEO, Dorris Consulting International, has almost 34 years of government experience in acquisition, technical and program management to customer experience. Martha has run many government organizations that build and deliver agency and citizen facing programs to deliver government services anytime, anywhere on any device. Most recently, Martha led and managed GSA’s Office of Strategic Programs where she brought a customer-centric lens to the services and acquisitions they award.
Charlotte Lee, Associate Curator
Charlotte Lee is an award-winning entrepreneur and human-centered design practitioner based in Washington D.C. She is the founder and CEO of Monday Design Company, a service design consultancy as well as Kastling Group, a digital transformation consultancy. She is a strategic advisor to public and private executives in organizations undergoing IT modernization. Many of her clients seek partnership to help execute their vision of a holistic view of transformation that places human achievement as the measure of success. Her professional path in product management and user experience design was taken with the vision of a more human-friendly world in every way. Charlotte’s current portfolio at the House of Representatives exemplifies her two biggest passions- human centricity and strengthening democracy. She is very energized by the opportunity to apply HCD and design thinking to examine and reimagine the way ideas turn into law.
Lou Rosenfeld, Associate Curator
Lou Rosenfeld is Rosenfeld Media’s founder and publisher. Like many user experience folk, Lou started somewhere (library science), made his way somewhere else (information architecture), and has ended up in an entirely different place (publishing). Lou spent most of his career in information architecture consulting, first as founder of Argus Associates and later as an independent consultant. He co-founded the Information Architecture Institute and the IA Summit. And he does know something about publishing, having edited or co-authored five books, including the IA “bible,” Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, and Search Analytics for Your Site.