Why visual design matters to civic engagement: A Q&A with We Who Engage team member Agustín Cepeda
“We tried to design every page to stand on its own… Every page was thought of as a poster that you could hang on your wall.”
By Nathan Arnosti and Agustin Cepeda
Agustín Cepeda (DUSP MCP ’20) joined the We Who Engage team in September 2020 and had an immediate impact on the design of our team’s work products, including our new report, The Civic Design Framework: Principles for public conversations during a time of crisis. I (Nathan) spoke with Agustín to understand his views on design and the Civic Design Framework.
Nathan: You bring a depth of design knowledge to our team. What brought you into this work?
Agustín: I got into design through architecture. When I was in architecture school, I was really interested in what makes something beautiful. For me it came down to clarity, especially clarity of ideas: how do you communicate them in a way that honors the idea and the reader?
Nathan: What was your path to getting to MIT and We Who Engage?
Agustín: After studying at the University of Texas, I practiced for six years as an architectural designer in New York, Barcelona, and Ghent. I realized that although I loved design, the problems we were asked to solve as architects — often rendering physical our clients’ wealth and power — weren’t meaningful to me. I felt a disconnect between the work I was doing (contributing to more unequal cities) and what I wanted it to be doing (building more just cities). City planning seemed like an opportunity to zoom out and understand architecture within the context of all the systems that contribute to justice in a city.
When I got to MIT, I found I related most to issues of community engagement, participatory action research (PAR), and negotiation. As a project manager, I was used to considering our client’s aspirations, my boss’s preferences, the engineer’s requirements, the carpenter’s constraints, and building codes to find a deal that could work for everyone. That made me familiar with the idea that there are many different truths and that everybody has their own perspective on what would be best.
Nathan: What was your first encounter with the civic design framework and with Caesar?
Agustín: I took Ceasar’s class [Engaging Community: Models and Methods for Designers and Planners] my first year at DUSP. We used the Civic Design Framework to organize a community engagement event in San Pedro, Mexico. Design principles like systemic change and ecological networks helped us anchor our efforts in a broad purpose, and provided a structure for talking about what we did afterwards.
Nathan: We just released the civic design framework report. You might not be able to say this, but I can: the draft I initially saw had a lot of the core ideas, but was not nearly as well designed as it ended up being. I credit you for that. I’m curious to hear went into the design changes that you made to this report.
Agustín: This report has been years in the making. Even before I arrived at MIT there were drafts in the works. The most recent iterations were written by We Who Engage team members Sharon Velasquez and Julia Curbera. When I inherited the report [in September 2020], the big ideas had already been beautifully distilled. My job was to synthesize them into a compelling visual format.
The main task was to make the Civic Design Framework tools more approachable. The existing tool was a 6x8 table: six conversation types for the rows and eight design principles for the columns. This created 48 empty squares, representing all of the possible overlaps between the conversations and principles. It was clear, but overwhelming.
When I was in his class, Ceasar had mentioned the idea of layering the conversation types and design principles in overlapping circles. This idea — which became our “Civic Spinner” — works because it centers the overlaps between the parts while sparing the reader from the 48 empty squares generated by the matrix. It introduces the concept without asking for input. Visualizing the spinner using gears was We Who Engage Design team member Courtney Lee’s idea. Within an hour after our first design meeting she sent several drafts featuring gears, and they stuck!
There was another opportunity to make the Framework more approachable by grouping the conversations and principles. Six conversations and eight principles were just too many to remember easily. At a dinner with my friends from Ceasar’s class, Julia Curbera and Daniela Cocco Beltrame, I explained the dilemma and presented my first drafts. As if she’d been waiting for the question all night, Daniela said, “What if the conversations were divided into: ‘Think — Plan — Act.’ And what if the design principle categories created a phrase that was easy to remember, like ‘Situated — Engagement — for Justice.’” All credit goes to Daniela for the names.
Nathan: Is there a conversation type or a principle that you feel really resonates with you?
Agustín: I love “framing” conversations. When I’m lost in a conversation, I find clarity in zooming out. Framing conversations ask us to define the boundaries of what we’re talking about. Another way of saying people have different perspectives is that people have different frames of reference. Framing conversations reveal them, and make a request: let’s figure out how our frames fit together first, then jump in together.
The design principle that stands out for me is “healing.” Healing entails recognizing a hurt and designing a response to it. It’s about articulating needs, growing with intention, and defining accountability. I don’t think we’re ever fully broken or ever fully healed. Designing for healing is about acknowledging our position on that spectrum and figuring out what we need to move in a healing direction.
