MIT Professor Ceasar McDowell on the essential role that public conversations play in a democracy: a Q&A
“Our goal is to find ways for the public to be in conversation with itself, to make democracy possible.”
By Nathan Arnosti and Ceasar McDowell
I (Nathan) have been a part of the We Who Engage MIT team with Ceasar McDowell since September 2020. Following the release of our new report, The Civic Design Framework: principles for public conversations during a time of crisis, I sat down with Ceasar to learn more about his career in civic design and his motivations for creating the Civic Design Framework. The following is an edited transcript of our conversation.
Nathan: You’ve had a long career designing, facilitating, and studying civic engagement strategies. What brought you to the world of civic engagement and design in the first place?
Ceasar: Having been a child of the civil rights movement — and I was actually a child — I always had a sense that the collective work of people on the ground makes a difference.
Many years later, I was in a conversation with civil rights leader Bob Moses. I asked him, what was the most important thing to come out of the civil rights movement in the South? Was it the Voting Rights Act? Bob replied that most important thing actually was the meeting: the ability of sharecroppers to come together, share their stories, and move en masse. I’ve always felt that that was an essential step.
And I’ve always been interested in the places we live — what are the ways we organize with the institutions that are there to serve us? That’s what’s gotten me thinking about civic engagement, as opposed to movement work, which go hand in hand.
Nathan: I’d be interested to hear your progression from having roots in movement building to focusing on civic engagement.
Ceasar: It may have started when I worked in Alaska. Early in my life, I was offered a job in a place called Kotzebue, the seat of a borough that was 36,000 square miles, about the size of Indiana, with 11 villages, no roads in between them and around 5,000 people, 90% of whom were Inupiaq. My task was to build out the mechanisms that would help the community hold its first Inupiaq-controlled school system accountable.
The superintendent’s basic philosophy was while we are here to provide the best education for the children, we are also a bureaucracy and sometimes that will get in the way of our goal. So we have to build something externally to keep the public’s voice in front of us. I found that pretty interesting: that notion that public institutions really need fully involved, engaged publics in order to actually do what they need to do.
That’s probably the first place where that shift [to focusing on civic engagement versus organizing] started to happen.
Nathan: Let’s talk about the civic design framework. This report is new, but you’ve taught classes and given presentations and applied this framework to your own practice for a number of years now. What is the origin story of the civic design framework?
Ceasar: I work on the design of human interaction, particularly across differences.
When I was part-time at MIT and working at the Interaction Institute for Social Change in Boston, I was asked by the Barr Foundation [in 2014] to help the city plan a public engagement process for its transportation plan. They were particularly interested in getting more folks of color and people from marginalized communities into the conversation about the future of transportation in the city.
Nathan: This is one of the case studies that we ended up writing about.
Ceasar: That’s right. This got us going to a citywide scale, with real complex divisions, and really thinking through what it takes to bring people into a conversation that is usually dominated by very strong interest groups. Today, people say it was among the most successful public engagement campaign in Boston, that it brought the most diverse set of voices together.
Analyzing that [project], I realized there were really two different things going on. One was that we had to have clarity about the types of conversations people were in. The other was the design elements that we need to have in place to make sure that everyone feels welcomed. That was the early stage of the framework.
I came back to MIT and really started to delve deeper into it with students and other faculty, and eventually it became what it is.
Nathan: Is there is a conversation type or a principle that you see as particularly relevant to the challenges we’re facing today?
Ceasar: I think there is one conversation type and two design principles that are really important for where we are. The conversation type is Framing — we need to create opportunities for the public to reimagine what they think America can be. I firmly believe that the vast majority of people are capable of being in a framing conversation if we actually design it so that it fits who they are.
The two design principles that make that possible are Design for the Margins — how you can design conversations so they are bringing people on the margins in. And the margins exist in all kinds of ways in this country. The second design principle is Healing. I don’t think you can design something for the margins and have that be successful if you don’t also have a strategy for healing.
Nathan: Has anything surprised you as you’ve been sharing the civic design framework?
Ceasar: One of the most surprising things came almost two years ago, when we held a workshop with an early version of the civic design framework. What we learned there is that the framework is not just important for saying what you can do — it’s a really powerful evaluation tool. People can assess their own capacity and figure out what their organization is good at, and where they need help.
Another thing is a year ago, we worked with students at Florida Gulf Coast University, whose teacher used the framework to organize their class. What was fascinating is how the students — who came from poor working-class white families, from the Seminole tribe, from immigrant families — had their own interpretations of the design principles. They found a way to connect with those design principles and apply them to what they were trying to do in their communities. To me, that adaptability is really important.
Nathan: Is there anything else that you’d like to add?
Ceasar: I’m really looking forward to finding ways for people to give feedback, to help us understand how they might be applying the framework. We’re open to any suggestions, criticism, or ideas. Our goal is to find ways for the public to be in conversation with itself, to make democracy possible.
