At the Intersection of Civics and Design: Untapped Potential
How an overeager Poli. Sci. major discovered a Scout Labs story.
By Veronica Cihlar
On an overcast and dreary morning last Friday, a few of us from Scout gathered in Ruggles Station to make our way to a Boston-area middle school. As we trickled in one by one and hopped on the Orange Line, I realized I didn’t really know what I was doing there apart from asking people too many questions, trying not to get in their way, and attempting to figure out what the passage of Bill S.2631 in the Massachusetts State House last November had to do with design. I would learn, in fact, a lot.
Scout Labs x MONUM
While much of Scout is made up of several Scout Studio teams, each of which consists of several designers and developers serving individual and private clients, Scout Labs is a creature of its own. Scout Labs is made up of only one team, which is currently partnering with the City of Boston Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics (MONUM for short). The Scout Labs team partners with MONUM to focus on design not for start-ups or companies, but for the benefit of the residents of Boston through socially innovative projects. MONUM is the City of Boston’s civic-research-and-design branch. They experiment, they prototype, they engineer creative solutions through human-centered design; in many ways, MONUM and Scout share quite a few similarities. MONUM is also able to take more risks due to increased flexibility that a lot of local or municipal governments could not otherwise afford to take — and it is here that Massachusetts General Court Bill S.2631 comes into play.
The bill was passed last November, and amongst other goals, now makes it mandatory for Massachusetts public schools “serving eighth-grade students to provide at least one student-led, non-partisan civics project for each student.” In the future, these projects could take on a variety of forms, whether on the individual, group, or class scale. Many key players in Massachusetts government and politics alike emphasized the importance of the bill’s passage at this time specifically. State Senate President Karen E. Spilka (D-Ashland) added that many young people “are no longer content to sit on the sidelines while their futures are decided by others,” making comprehensive civics education “critically important for the future of our Commonwealth, our nation and our democracy.”
The role of MONUM, and the role of Scout Labs in their partnership, is to figure out the best way to implement this new law on a city-wide level in the Boston Public School, or BPS, system.
Scout Labs and the Role of User Research
So what exactly does implementing this new law, on the ground, look like? And where to start? The answer is: why reinvent the wheel if you don’t have to? Boston isn’t the first or the only municipality trying to undertake such a major improvement of its civics education curriculum.
One member of the Scout Labs team, who is in charge of researching what civics programs look like in other cities and states across the country, mentioned the example of North Carolina. She explained that the state of North Carolina provides materials and a curriculum, but makes it “optional,” so that “it isn’t as outlined.” However, she continued, in some cities, “the structure is much more rigid.” She also mentioned the recent rise of the buzzword “service learning” in conjunction with civics education systems, and that framing civics education as such could be particularly useful to the student-led project portion of the curriculum here in Massachusetts. While looking at different cities provides valuable insight into the possibilities for Boston and potential for it to emulate what those cities are doing, what Scout Labs and MONUM have to figure out is what would work best for the people — the students — of our own city.
So off we were, our Orange Line train attempting to ride as smoothly as possible along its now-damp rails, to do what I learned was user research.
User research is used to evaluate a person’s — the user’s — needs through “various qualitative and quantitative methods“ — like taking surveys, conducting interviews, reading relevant topical studies, etc.
Another way to explain it is that user research is the “process of understanding the impact of design on an audience.” And so we researched. We guided change-making brainstorming sessions, we probed and we prodded at the issues that mattered the most to students, and we even had our subjects — eighth graders — fill out worksheets about how they would plan to solve these issues. We took copious amounts of notes, used colorful Post-Its that we later collected, charted, and analyzed, and worked to make sure we were either running on time or ahead of it so as not to derail the entire school day. It was a live, on-the-ground crash course on in-person user research. And lucky for me, in the middle of my final year of a Political Science Bachelor’s, it was research on civics.
A Bigger Conversation Around Youth and Our Current Politics
All of the data that was collected on Friday will go on to inform the specific way the City of Boston will choose to implement Bill S.2631, with the help of MONUM and Scout Labs. This bill is critically important for the state of Massachusetts for many reasons, but its main aim is to productively educate children to become model, active, and voting citizens. Upon the passage of the bill, Education Secretary James Peyser even remarked that “in the end, civics should help our young people develop a love of our Commonwealth and our country and the democratic values they embody.”
However, I don’t think it ends there. Some of what I heard on Friday was positive, inspiring. Much of it, however, was sobering and unsettling. It was clear that not even a middle school classroom was spared from the deepening political cynicism that has pervaded many corners of popular culture and social interactions in recent years. My own middle school years, and many of those of my fellow undergraduates, seemed full of levity in comparison. Some of the reasons for the pursuit of my degree began to take shape in those formative years. Yet all I saw before me were thirteen-year-olds with much of the same resignation and defeat I saw in thirty year-olds, and in some of my college peers.
One student shared how lucky she was that she was able to meet all of her great-grandparents. She, however, felt little optimism in the hope that she would live to reach their age. “We’ll all die in like 50 years,” she stated matter-of-factly, citing climate change as the culprit. Many of her classmates shared similar concerns.
To hear such defeat from a young teenager was disheartening. On one hand, this kind of resignation is a threat to our democratic institutions because it leads to apathy and a lack of participation in our democratic processes, opening them up to potential power abuses from those at the top.
On the other hand, it is also just sad to see an eighth grader already this pessimistic about the world she lives in. We feel we have a responsibility to somehow shield children from feeling this way. To many, the effect of youth is regeneration. We look to the young for novelty, vitality, innovation, and idealism. Literally a new generation, with a renewed hope, and without the level of jadedness towards the institutions we have seen decline alongside a sharp increase in the distrust of government. So it is concerning that such young students, with so much potential and who should be hopeful towards their futures, already harbor some of the same cynicism that we do.
Though perhaps not in explicit intention, the enactment of Bill S.2631 (officially titled, An Act to promote and enhance civic engagement), is the first step in battling this kind of withdrawal. Put simply, an individually-chosen personalized project is not the same as long lectures on the necessity of voting or the abstraction of rights granted to each American by our Constitution (though important they remain).
A student-led civics project is a chance for students to engage with government through civics in their own way, through their own lenses, on issues that matter most to them — to, essentially, make civics truly their own, and feel heard. If executed successfully, the bill mandating these projects could begin planting the seeds of restoring trust in our government on all levels, and increasing social investment into what occurs in the Massachusetts State House, and perhaps even on Capitol Hill.
And it looks like MONUM and Scout Labs are poised to help bring about this much-needed change — through design.
