Designing for Cities

Chapter 5. Our Approach

Whether civic or commercial, we approach projects with a similar blend of Design Thinking, Lean Start-Up, and Agile methodologies. We’ve made adjustments to ensure that we can work efficiently and across disciplines throughout the design process. Our approach generally follows the process of alignment, followed by iterative design sprints of concepting, prototyping, and testing, which eventually leads to a pilot and then a full-scale deployment.

This iterative process of concepting, prototyping, and testing allows us to move from understanding users’ needs and values to creating the features that will serve those needs and values to designing the interactions and interfaces that enable the features to come to life. By prototyping and reviewing with collaborators, we’re able to incorporate the needs of each group and align the team around a central vision.

Figure 5-1. An oversimplified visualization of our approach

In this next section, we’ll describe in more detail how we structure each of these steps for civic design projects.

Alignment

Assuming that the entire team is in agreement about how the project is defined and what the goals are is entirely common. But typically, people have different understandings of the project, and if left uncorrected, the teammates will each head in a different direction. Alignment ensures that the team is moving in the same ...