Title
Brief description
Civic Design Lab facilitates dialogues and co-creates solutions in collaboration with government agencies, local businesses and communities for improved public services by applying a racial equity lens, human-centred design and systems thinking approach. It helps local government decision making by designing current and future policies with the people, for the people and by the people.
Keywords
Co-creation, collaboration, systems thinking, human-centred, equity, resilience
City/Country
Time period
2017 - Present
Lever(s)
Methodologies
Civic Labs
Purpose: Civic Labs were chosen as a bottom-up community discussion, deliberation and co-creation method for citizens to actively participate in decision-making in the city.
CDL is first and foremost a people-centric innovation lab, where systems thinking and racial equity lens meet human cantered design.
The Theory of Change of CDL consists of 4 phases:
Discovery: Identifying and listening to key voices from local communities, innovators and stakeholders that can influence decision making.
Discussion: Bringing together all local and regional stakeholders who are impacted by the problem. Continuous, cyclical discussions in varying sizes of groups to facilitate most efficient interactions.
Data: Documentation, analysis and validation of data
Design: Experimenting, building prottypes and sharing of ideas with all stakeholders involved in the process.
This phased approach have been implemented within thematic projects & initiatives such as
World Region
Scale(s) of the case analysed
Target audience and dimension
Domain(s) of application
Context addressed
Solution applied
Challenge addressed/ Problem-led approach
Barriers addressed
Main Practices
Impact
Co benefits
Engagement Journey
Impact to climate neutrality
In Civic Design Lab Oakland, the city facilitate co-creation and collaborative problem solving of the challenges that the city faces. It has been applied to achieve systemic changes and as a tool to address complex health, socio-economic and environmental projects. This case study exhibits how to ensure that relevant stakeholders are at the table, capture their voices and create a highly iterative process such that the solutions are collectively owned and implemented.
Context & Public policy of reference
In 2016, the City of Oakland released its Resilient strategy for 2017-2019 in partnership with 100 Resilient Cities. The Civic Design Lan (CDL) was identified an initiative within this resilience strategy development process. CDL is positioned as an in-house civic consultancy dedicated to helping Oakland and other cities become more resilient to the physical, social and economic challenges that are a growing part of the 21st century.
Innovative approach(es) addressed
Civic Design Lab Oakland creates an infrastructure for fostering collaboration and building resilience through trust and transparency for all. Civic Design Lab makes local government work better by designing current and future government services and policies with the people, for the people, by the people in the 21st century.
Initiator
The Civic Design Lab (CDL) is a civic innovation lab within Oakland City Hall that grew out of the 3-year community-led Resilient Oakland initiative (100 Resilient Cities program)
Stakeholder networks and organisational model
CDL has been initiated through a public-private-partnership to convene, incubate, and solve civic resiliency challenges for Oaklanders. Stakeholders and citizens engaged in this process make decisions together.
The process gathers all kinds of citizens and stakeholders, including those with prior experience in working on the given issue, and creates varying combinations in group compositions.
The initiatives or projects defined under Civic Design Lab ensures that discussions continue along the thematic lines for the long term. By setting up working groups per project, citizens and stakeholders remain engaged in all phases from start to finish and feedback and evaluation thereafter.
| Stakeholder (group) | Role |
Citizens | Discussion and collaboration |
Private stakeholders | Discussion and collaboration |
Designers & innovators | Prototyping and discussion |
Local governments | Facilitating discussion and follow up |
Democratic Purpose
Participant Recruitment
nteraction between participants
Resources
Key enablers
Key inhibiting factors
Drawbacks/pros/cons of the solutions (after implementation)
Scalability
Key lessons
Creation of initiatives along the themes of rent, healthy housing and financial empowerment
- Funding allocate from city budgets to address the abovementioned initiatives
- Multiple workshops facilitated
- Several people engaged (continue to be engaged)
Successful aspects:
- A theory of change built upon systems thinking and human centric design through a racial equity lens
- Application of the theory of change through initiatives addressing socio-economic issues
- Facilitation of multi-disciplinary stakeholders and citizens in a co-design process Private-public partnerships leveraged to allocate funding for implementation of the initiatives
Indicators
- Number of people engaged
- Testimonies of participants
- Time spent on co-creation activities
- Number of services/ projects co-designed
- Number of diverse demographic groups represented