April 2018: It’s time to start designing for democracy, with Dana Chisnell

This month, we’re excited to welcome past Fluxible speaker Dana Chisnell to uxWaterloo to share her insights and experiences trying to improve the voting process in the United States. Dana will be presenting to us remotely, a format that has worked well in previous sessions this season.

Dana’s talk will show how every great designed experience starts with the stories of individual humans.

At the Center for Civic Design, Dana and her team collected close to 1,000 stories from U.S. voters over 5 years. They used the stories to visualize and map the voting experience. This revealed two massive gaps in the process.

First, people who administer elections and voters have very different mental models on the process of voting.

The second gap was between privileged voters and burdened voters. These gaps explained why it’s harder than it should be to vote in the U.S.

The stories also showed that several policies that were meant to make things better had unintended consequences that actually make it worse. And just as in the private sector and across lots of different kinds of organizations, design research could have helped solve real problems without causing new ones.

It’s time to start designing for democracy.

Pizza and drinks will be served at the event.

Please register for this free event

Thursday April 19, 2018
5:30pm to 7:00pm
3rd Floor Theatre, Roddenberry, Communitech
151 Charles Street West
Kitchener, Ontario