Pacenotes: What Digital Spaces and Communities Can Learn from Public, Physical Spaces

In this edition of Pacenotes, I’ll be diving into some super interesting work done by Civic Signals, a group led by Eli Pariser and Talia Stroud.

You might recall Pariser’s name as the author of The Filter Bubble, where he was an early observer of the phenomenon of polarisation on our digital platforms. Before writing that book, Pariser led MoveOn.org, which was a non-profit focused on citizen engagement. Then he started Upworthy, which tried to turn civic ideas into viral memes.

Talia Stroud is a professor of communications at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work has focused on commercially viable and democratically desirable ways to improve media. So, Pariser and co. have plenty of experience thinking about how communities form on the internet, how to mobilise them, and what gets them talking—and doing.

The premise of Civic Signals’ work is to ask what our digital spaces can learn from successful public spaces. We’ve designed public parks, libraries, and other spaces for generations, after all. A Civic Signals video lists the invention of the weekend, the public library and public high-schools among the reforms that created healthier public spaces.

What sorts of features do good public spaces have? According to Civic Signals:

• Develop programming — social activities — that draw different groups in, without over-optimizing for any one group
• Offer visual cues as to what kinds of behavior are invited in the space
• Are designed to be physically accessible and attractive to many different populations
• Engage stewards, leaders, and maintainers who can do the labor of community-building
• Are designed in partnership with the communities that use them.

But public spaces don’t just promote these nebulous ideas of belonging or community. A study of the 1995 Chicago heatwave by the sociologist Eric Klinenberg, which led to 793 deaths, showed that parts of the city with more public libraries and parks were correlated with fewer deaths. That’s because, Civic Signals says, those vulnerable to the heatwave were also more likely to have a local community that would check in on them if they were absent from their usual hangouts.

When it comes to digital spaces on the internet, we face a “private-public” mismatch, Civic Signals tells us. “Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Reddit and so on are private space, and they’re owned by private companies. And they’re designed with the goals of private companies in mind,” its video says.

Digital product design tell us about ‘user experience’ and ‘user-friendly’ design principles. But Civic Signals observes that this framing is rooted in the corporate vision of privately owned platforms. For corporations, letting users perform actions with little friction are in service of better engagement metrics, a larger top-line and so on.

User-friendly design isn’t necessarily in sync with what Civic Signals calls “public-friendly design,” which helps publics, or sub-sets of publics, achieve their collective goals easily.

The two principles can be in tension, as a variant of the tragedy of the commons. As Civic Signals puts it, “maximizing every individual’s well-being is not the same as maximizing group well-being.”

Take the seemingly innocuous design principle of friction. With user-friendly design, the idea is to eliminate friction where ever possible so that users can perform tasks seamlessly. The whole idea is not to make users have to think about what the interface is asking them to do—which of course is the title of Steve Krug’s book evangelising this principle.

Civic Signals takes the opposite view. Instead of a smooth, seamless experience, it advocates for the introduction of friction in digital public spaces. “We believe that public spaces should not be frictionless. Friction and under-optimization lead to the serendipitous, incidental and generative human interactions where we encounter, discover and negotiate difference,” they write.

How does Civic Signals propose we design our digital public spaces? They suggest four building blocks: Welcome, Connect, Understand and Act. Each of these building blocks contains several “signals” or design principles that can be applied to a space.

The Welcome block, for example, comprises things like: Invite everyone to participate, encourage the humanisation of others, ensure people’s safety, keep people’s information secure.

These blocks are then arranged in a hierarchy, like so:

Key to the Civic Signals framework is a series of tests they did with digital platform users asking them to rate each platform according to the signals. Thus, we see that for the signal “cultivate belonging,” the platforms that were rated the best were Reddit, WhatsApp and Facebook. For “make power accessible” it was Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram whose users rated the highest.

The Civic Signals framework holds plenty of promise for those of us designing communities that use social tokens. The creation of public or quasi-public digital spaces cultivate things like a community of resilience, a sense of belonging, and a shared discourse that produce the valuable community that a social token can help coordinate.

In the following editions of Pacenotes, I’ll explore a few of the specific signals from the building blocks. The Civic Signals team has done a great job producing detailed and footnoted papers on each signal. I’ll dive into those paper and follow the literature trail a little bit to flesh out the signals that I think are most relevant to the social token space.

Further reading

Civic Signals slides on its framework

Get all the research, including the detailed papers on each signal

A great short (five minutes) video explaining Civic Signals’ premise