Meaningful Inefficiencies & Institutional Listening
The role of play, care, and trust in Civic Design — Reflection on the Lecture by Eric Gordon
This essay was written by Aude Vuilliomenet, Jasmine Omeke, and Ruth Nelson as part of our Emerging Leaders Program.
Summer has arrived in the Northern Hemisphere. Walking through London, Amsterdam, or even Chicago, the atmosphere feels different. People are out — the parks and public swimming pools welcome residents to cool off, the terraces extend to the streets to give place for social life and cultural institutions unroll music gigs, theatre shows, film screenings, sporting events, and outdoor art installations. Governmental and private institutions offer a wide and diverse set of activities. Digital tools, such as e-tickets, mobile apps, e-surveys, mobile bots, have been set to ease the processes of managing, responding, and guiding citizens. This is a traditional illustration of a city’s approach to “smartness” and “efficiency”. However, amongst these conventional notions of the smart city, the rich and dynamic inputs of residents are often standardized in ways that don’t keep up with changing conditions and that may exacerbate exclusion. Within the vibrations of the speakers and the laughter of the crowds, a voice is rising. It is centred on the call to connect, act, and care. A call rooted in what Eric Gordon, Professor of civic media at Emerson College, defines as Meaningful Inefficiencies. If you are interested in learning more about the changing landscape of citizen engagement in cities, this article will examine how institutions are pivoting to incorporate the need for persistent listening from a larger conglomerate of the population.
As part of the lecture series for the Urban AI think tank’s Emerging Leaders Program, Gordon argues that in societies dominated by Information Communication Technologies (ICTs), two paradigms are unfolding. One being the way in which institutions have created processes to interact with the public and another being changes to the ways that institutional messages are delivered. In lieu of cultivating exploration, experimentation, and reflection, the current discourse on smart cities focuses on removing uncertainties and frictions, making the city a seamless experience. In contrast to this thinking, Gordon and Mugar (2020) propose the concept of Meaningful Inefficiencies — a specific approach to civic design that favors building relationships, nurturing actions, and acknowledging deliberations in civic participation. In essence, city life is seamful and full of the unexpected. Rather than avoiding or streamlining that, why not embrace it to garner better outcomes?
The act of civic design embodies multiple concepts such as “social design”, “civic participation”, and “civic efficiency”. Where “social design” is used by Chris Le Dantec (2016) to describe the process of designing technologies with people who become invested in the outcomes, “civic participation” is defined by Gordon and Mihailidis (2016) as the extended involvement of individuals in a collective political decision-making process, and “civic efficiency” is characterised by John Dewey (2011) as the ability to get things done with others, even if disruptive, messy, and unpredictable. Through their work, Gordon and Mugar (2020), observe and highlight four components of civic design:
- Network building
- Holding space for discussion
- Distributed ownership
- Persistent input
The subsequent sections of this article undertake an exploratory analysis of the conceptual underpinnings of Meaningful Inefficiencies, followed by a more nuanced reflection on its practical application. Within this discussion, we aim to stimulate a debate on how our cities are designed, built, managed, regulated, and operated, challenging traditional notions of the “smart city”, which tend to be centred almost exclusively on centralised and top down urban governance.
Analysis
To contextualise the concept of Meaningful Inefficiencies, requires an acknowledgment that cities are complex. As Mike Batty (2013), Professor of Planning at University College London, explains in his book, The New Science of Cities, a city is a system composed of many systems that do not exist in benign environments, but are continuously, dynamically changing, flows of relational networks. Saskia Sassen (2013), Chair of Sociology at Columbia University, reiterates these ideas in her Ted Talk, referring to the city as “messy”, “complex” and “incomplete”. The work of Gordon on Meaningful Inefficiencies, emphasises that the public realm is indeed complex, composed of multiple stakeholders, governments, and publics, who have varying needs and interests that continuously change, expand, intersect , oppose, and transform over time.
The current discourse on smart cities and governance tends to focus on the power of technology to assist in easing out tensions by enabling the city to become a more efficient and less complex place. In this way, innovation within smart cities and governance has broadly echoed innovation within the tech industry, somewhat reflected by the famous quote from Mark Zuckerberg, “move fast and break things”. However, Gordon and Mugar (2020) argue in their book Meaningful Inefficiencies, whilst “moving fast” and “breaking things” might be very effective in a market driven setting, when operating in a civic context, change through innovation must include the trust that novel changes will effectively serve the diverse and complex publics. They advocate that if new technology is installed, with an absence of a process of engagement, it can serve to degenerate public trust and confidence in government institutions. Therefore, achieving efficiency, in the sense of allowing for a goal to be achieved with the least amount of friction, can actually be in opposition with the goal of building trust.
The UN Secretary-General, recently warned that a “trust deficit” threatens to undermine progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals. As the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs states:
“Trust is integral to the functioning of any society. Trust in each other, in our public institutions and in our leaders are all essential ingredients for social and economic progress, allowing people to cooperate with and express solidarity for one another.”
The civic sphere can thus be understood as inherently different to the free market requiring much deeper levels of trust and civic engagement. Meaningful Inefficiencies, as an approach towards civic design, is specifically centred on building and repairing trust with publics. Gordon and Mugar (2020) propose that if points of friction, or “inefficiencies” can be specifically designed into a system of civic engagement, they can, almost counter-intuitively, serve to be important moments for building trust. This in one sense, is in opposition to accepted norms of market innovation, which generally focus on the “quick”, “transactional”, and “temporary”. They characterise effective civic innovation as being “slow”, “relational”, and “persistent”. By focusing on creating opportunities for people to engage, a civic designer pursues adoption of an intervention through a relational, rather than transactional process. A Meaningful Inefficiency, carefully allows for the scaffolding of interactions that serve to connect people to one another to facilitate the act of trust building.
One way in which they operationalise these concepts is through the incorporation of novel technologies as an interface, such as augmented reality, to create a process through which people can play, refer to Figure 2 (to see more of Gordon’s projects refer to https://elab.emerson.edu/research/projects). In this way, Meaningful Inefficiencies is situated in the discourse of “The Playful Citizen”, where transdisciplinary scholars from media studies, cultural studies, and game studies are reflecting and envisioning the possibilities of digital media for civic engagement. Games and Play, they argue, are essential mediums to embed at the heart of city-making. In the book “The Playful Citizen” Michiel de Lange (2019) describes games as multifaceted, he states: “Games are composed of a set of constitutive rules, a material setting, and actualised through the embodied activities of the players. Play generates culture because it provides room for innovation. Play offers a safe space for experiments and collaborations in which failing does not immediately have grave consequences.”
Through incorporating play into civic engagement, Gordon advocates that one can actually cultivate a space for care. The civic designer, through creating these processes, is allowing for opportunities in which individual, civic and private actors can participate and thus demonstrate care through the co-creation of the civic realm. It must be emphasised that creating these kinds of opportunities is not a linear, tension-free process, but requires consistent engagement. This is precisely why the concept of Meaningful Inefficiencies becomes so relevant. Some of the embedded tensions and nuances around creating a context of care through play and building trust in the civic realm will be explored in the final section of this article.
Reflection
The final section of this article reflects on the practical application of Meaningful Inefficiencies, by asking “What is meaningful and for whom?”. Within the Urban AI program, the Emerging Leaders Program, this question is often recited as participants develop solutions for climate mitigation or adaptation in cities. Within the development of these solutions, inclusive engagement is an important topic that we dissect. As urban activities are a major source of climate change, cities and institutions are collaborating to find novel ways to approach this problem while engaging the public to change behaviours.
The Financial Times (FT) and Infosys produced a creative method of examining climate engagement by releasing a climate change game where the player assumes the role of a global leader with the task of saving the world from climate change with a trusted advisor from a specific domain. While the game’s rules are dictated by FT’s research, it highlights an interesting aspect of Gordon’s Meaningful Inefficiency framework — governmental institutions, on the one hand, must navigate being cultivators of a distributed network of care for residents, while, on the other hand, they must utilise collaborative strategies to build trust amongst a diverse public. While the game lets you pick one advisor, in reality, global policy makers have many vantage points and insights at their disposal and must synthesise how to make the right decisions that benefit as many residents as possible.
Navigating representation amongst diverse actors presents not only a challenge but also an opportunity to co-create new futures in inclusive urbanism. In addition to this, the very role of governmental institutions and policy makers in residents’ lives is heavily debated with varying responsibilities and scales of governance. The notion of care becomes even more complicated when you factor in non-governmental actors who may impact residents. In some instances, private actors may have a vested interest in things that seem to increase a community’s well-being — like retrofitting buildings with green infrastructure. While this may have benefits for the climate, it could be at the cost of increasing rents and exacerbating residents’ ability to remain in their neighbourhoods or be deemed as green washing. Additionally, city governments are often set up to only understand citizen’s input through a narrow set of parameters, like survey results. Given this intricate web of actors, local communities often need to secure their rights and advocate for their own needs. In this way, resident voices and ground-up initiatives are at the core of Meaningful Inefficiencies.
Through focusing on ground-up or often middle-ground up (inclusion of anchor institutions like universities) Gordon emphasises efforts that amplify the public feedback process, resulting in greater understanding of community needs. Instead of streamlined inputs, he advocates that a mix of approaches is necessary to create a web of reinforced voices that can guide institutions to meet the needs of a community. Community engagement often focuses on the process of rallying a variety of voices, one example being that of deep institutional listening, refer to Figure 3. The real challenge however seems to arise in how to navigate a lack of consensus among diverse actors. What was agreed upon yesterday could fall out of favour with time. Different residents may or may not feel comfortable providing their input at all through formal or informal channels. Questions like these may be philosophical in nature, but can be important guiding points for cities to truly distribute networks of care that engage residents of differing abilities, socio-economic statuses, and worldviews.
Navigating the input of under-represented groups, Gordon introduces the concept of using “influencers as connectors or trust brokers”. A ground-up influencer may understand their community especially well and have built up the trust needed to gather feedback. As such, they have an ability to lobby for help from local organisations, and make connections that can result in positive outcomes for a community. The notion of an “influencer” has mixed connotations, especially in relation to recent scandals around bait and switch marketing campaigns, such as the Fyre Festival. Although recently, there has been a shift away from “influencing “and toward “creators” or “curators” who make content they genuinely care about. In the realm of Meaningful Inefficiencies, this highlights that the “ground-up” champion, regardless of title, needs to advocate for community needs and be self-reflexive about how they are authentically engaging others. They can’t monopolise their influence, and they need to be a propeller of other voices that may not share their beliefs.
Meaningful Inefficiencies may seem jarring to co-locate with the ramifications of decision making, but it underscores a need for flexibility and adaptability. No centralised system or single actor in urban governance or community change has all the answers. Furthermore, no central institution or group can continually create the rules of engagement. To craft better futures, collaborative planning and governance are increasingly crucial. Bypassing or circumventing community input for the sake of expediency may reap faster short-term results, but it is particularly not suited for long lasting, pervasive change and trust building.
Instead of asking “How can an institution or certain organisation bring about change?”, people in power, residents, and community institutions could ask “What is the right mix of flexible engagement that will further enrich my viewpoint and help create sustainable solutions?” and “How do we make sure the input process doesn’t exclude the very people who not only gain from better policy decisions, but also contribute to the increased vibrancy of the city?”. The answers to these questions could highlight that the drive to increase community input and improve well-being hinges on collaboration. In this way, we propose that innovation in the civic realm, so often limited to “smart city” concepts, is less about efficiently changing it, but rather about cultivating trust through care to meaningfully engage and co-create a better civic realm for the communities who reside within it.
Authors
Aude Vuilliomenet is a PhD Student at The Bartlett, Connected Environment Lab, Center for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), UCL. Her research “Gardens of Things” focus on urban green infrastructure, outdoor IoT, deep learning on tiny computing devices.
Jasmine Omeke is Urbanist & Software Engineer. Interested in civic tech, ethnography, and urban cartography. She holds a Bachelor of Arts at Harvard and a Master in Computer Science from DePaul University. She is currently a Data Engineer at Netflix.
Ruth Nelson is an urban data scientist and strategic designer. She conducts inter-disciplinary research on Urban Inequality as a PhD at TU Delft in the Netherlands.
References
- Batty, M., 2013. The new science of cities. MIT press.
- De Lange, M., 2019. 18. The playful city: Citizens making the smart city. The Playful Citizen, p.349.
- Dewey, J. 2011. Democracy and education. New York: Simon and Brown
- Glas R., Lammes S., de Lange M., Raessens J, and de Vries I., 2019, The playful citizen: civic engagement in a mediatized culture, Amsterdam University Press, http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvcmxpds
- Gordon, E. and Mihailidis, P., 2016. Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice.
- Gordon, E. and Mugar, G., 2020. Meaningful inefficiencies: civic design in an age of digital expediency. Oxford University Press.
- Le Dantec, C. (2016). Designing publics. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
- Orii, L., Alonso, L. and Larson, K., 2020. Methodology for Establishing Well-Being Urban Indicators at the District Level to be Used on the CityScope Platform. Sustainability, 12(22), p.9458.
