Design Changes Everything.
W hile no two government innovation labs are the same, we are all striving towards the same goal — to make our cities better by design.
This week, Civic Design Lab (CDL) cohosted the City Spotlight session on Oakland as part of the opening day at City Innovate Foundation’s annual Bridge SF Conference, to highlight our approach to civic design and tech equity alongside our own Jose Corona at the Mayor’s Office and Lilibeth Gangas from Kapor Center.
Lilibeth Gangas wrote a fantastic piece on 3 steps to an inclusive tech ecosystem, and we look forward to continue collaborating with Kapor Center on driving innovation in Oakland, which over 400,000 of us call home.
The perspective Civic Design Lab brought was focused on how we have designed and continue to refine the process of inclusive public engagement to reengineer the course of where local government is headed. After all, it is government’s job to deliver.
This is a summary of our talking points:
- Overview of why Oakland leads with equity.
- Behind the scenes of CDL’s R&D model for civic innovation.
- Why we are democratizing design and how we are embedding it in every department.
- Our vision for equitable change management.
Many parallels can be drawn between government innovation labs and startups, both in the economies of scale and the breadth of competencies needed within relatively small teams to operate in a new market. What sets government innovation labs apart is the fact that because it is woven into the fabrics of the institution at the outset our work can have lasting ripple effects in places we work, and as a result, fundamentally changing the public’s relationship with government, and by extension, the city. At the end of the day, however, it is all about equity. While technology or any other niche industry may come and go, governments are the first institutions of our cities, and will be our last.
Oakland’s Civic Design Lab is still a startup of its own, formed through a private public partnership, conceived by former Chief Resilience Officer Kiran Jain as an implementation engine of Oakland’s Resilience Strategy — the result of a 3-year community-led process where our own residents identified Oakland’s core values and priorities that measure up to our vision for a resilient city. As such, our projects are thematic on purpose — we take on issues that are important to our community, but we also only take it on if we can bring together champions from multiple departments. I wrote about that in our manifesto here.
We are at a turning point in our urban development. California is the 5th largest economy in the world, but Oakland has the 7th highest income inequality in the nation. Case in point, two Oaklanders can “live a mile apart and be twice as likely to be unemployed and live 15 years less” (Schaaf, 2015). We need to do something about that.
Democratizing Design: Government is the key operation system of our cities. As much as we embrace technology, no matter how good the code base is, if it is incompatible with the infrastructure in which we are trying to operate in, we will hit a brick wall. So, we have set out on a mission to modernize government by democratizing design thinking, and offering service design training to improve city’s services and user experience.
Building Capacity: In our case, user experience goes both ways. In addition to uncovering how our residents actually experience government, we also build capacity of public servants who are behind design and delivery of the city’s policies and services. We need to design a better experience of how public servants do their work, because we need them to understand how residents experience the services, but more importantly, we need our public servants to go on and continue designing more accessible, inclusive, easy to use services, by design.
How We Do R & D: Oakland’s Secret Sauce
The ‘R’ of our R & D is not limited to research. We are amplifying it threefold by doing away with the traditional, monolithic model of governance and instead advancing an agile, human-centered, and equitable approach to civic innovation. Originally developed by Kiran Jain during her tenure as Chief Resilience Officer at City of Oakland (who spoke at Bridge SF conference 2 years earlier), these are made of three intersecting values that amplify each other.
Model for Civic Innovation — 3 R’s
1. Racial Equity Lens is about Oakland’s Racial Identity: We are the home of the original Black Panther movement. If you’ve been there, done that, and got the t-shirt, it’s about time we remember those stories are actually real. Government is mandated to be inclusive by default, but it is also a system created by people, so it’s not perfect. The onus is on each of us to to recognize the biases of an existing system that’s been built decades ago based on the social mores and conventions that no longer apply to the present.
2. Responsive Experience: We practice human-centered design because government is all about the human experience, changing what it is like to interface with a government service by ironing out our kinks one service at a time. Of course, tackling one service at a time is very time consuming, so we are training all of our 17 departments through its internal champions to catalyze our 5,000 staff to do it on their own.
3. Radical Change through Systems Thinking: We are all about understanding the technical stack of government. It’s not about what is in the employee handbooks or department’s policies, but it’s about how they are actually being implemented. Let’s face it: delivery is what matters. It also means that we need to be in the mindset that government is in perpetual beta, and being more agile in the way we respond to challenges.
Equitable Development: Method for Change-making — 4 D’s
1. Discovery — We listen. We go to people who have spent a lot of time thinking about the problems we are trying to tackle — it is not uncommon to find someone who has worked on social issues for decades, and generations. We also sit down with key decision-makers who may have the influence over the prototypes that emerge from our bottom-up design process. If we co-create from day one, we have higher probability of our suggestions being adopted and institutionalized.
2. Discuss — Next, we bring together all of the local and regional stakeholders that interface with problems we have identified and have a candid discussion. This stage is a cyclical because these conversations may happen one-on-one, in large groups, and over multiple meetings. Sometimes we need to act as translators and synthesize notes from these conversations but we set the expectation that our interactions with stakeholders are never a one-off.
3. Data — Data itself is meaningless unless we can ask the right questions to analyze it. It is also important to stay open minded about what we find, as data may validate our original assumptions, or it may completely challenge them. Often, as scientific researchers, we fall into the trap of confirmation bias because we, too, are human. But if we do our due diligence and ensure we are asking good questions to start with, the data will write the rest of the story for us.
4. Design –Building prototypes of a new way in which we might deliver a service is a very useful way to illustrate the difference our work makes. As designers, we are obsessed with frameworks and process maps more so than we are with any one set of tactical toolkit precisely because the challenges we face are always complex. At this stage, what’s most important is less about the fidelity of the prototype we build for various services and products, but it is about who gets brought into the room to see it. For our work to have traction, we need the key decision-makers taking full ownership of what we co-create with our stakeholders and run with it. Closing the loop through ownership transfer and effectively designing ourselves out of projects is what makes our work truly stick.
Case Study: Youth Financial Empowerment
Here’s one of our current projects where the above R&D method was used. You can learn more about this project in more detail here.
In short, our country is boasting one of the lowest unemployment rates in history, but have the folks over at EDD asked the other set of questions — how many have given up looking for jobs altogether? How many don’t know to ask?
To get to the bottom of this question, we need to ask people who are actually working on this issue — employers, service providers, city staff, workforce department, but most importantly, our youth. You have to map what it means from the youth perspective, because if they fail along their journey, it doesn’t matter what everyone else is doing.
We continue to test our hypotheses by tackling them one by one across the four dimensions of discovery, discussion, data, and design. We believe that when everyone’s at the table, silos are not needed anymore, and that’s how we will get to resilience.
In our next blogpost, we will share some of our current challenges and what we are learning from working within government. Some of the questions that come to mind are:
- What we do when we don’t have all the answers.
- What the private sector should know about working with government, and Oakland, in particular.
- What has been our biggest challenge to date.
- When should people not work with innovation labs.
You can also leave your questions in the comment section below or tweet us a suggestion via @civicdesignlab.
