Democratizing Discourse - Masters Thesis
Are local governments designed for equitable citizen participation? Civic engagement intends to empower citizens and ensure representative governance, but barriers to participation can hinder those positive outcomes. City council meetings, a key venue for public input, present unique challenges to engagement such as overwhelming meeting durations and intimidating formalities. These challenges are especially prevalent for Generation Z who self-report that they don’t have enough time or don’t feel informed enough for civic engagement. My thesis research explores how the design of multimodal mediating artifacts, inspired by the design critique, can enhance accessibility for Gen Z adults’ participation in city council meetings and foster more democratic public discourse at the local level.
Drawing from Activity Theory and Habermas’ Public Sphere Theory, I frame city council meetings as dynamic systems of public discourse and investigate how mediating artifacts can address accessibility issues. To enhance the discourse, I also apply Multimodality which focuses on utilizing more than one mode of communication (visual, linguistic, spatial, etc.) in one medium to improve understanding. I propose multimodal mediating artifacts as a distinguished kind of instrument for facilitating communication. With a Gen Z audience in mind, digitally enhancing artifacts intends to create more approachable avenues for their participation in public input.
Perhaps not the most obvious parallel, I compare city council meetings and the design critique, characterizing both as activities of discourse. Identifying this intersection allows me to position my experience with contemporary critique methods as a valuable reference point outside of a design environment. Critique, with its structured approach to dialogue and evaluation, serves as an inspirational model for fostering meaningful feedback between diverse participants. Additionally, critiques often utilize mediating artifacts, many of which are multimodal. By identifying successful critique artifacts and applying them to the context of a city council meeting, I aim to facilitate more democratic discourse.
This study uses the city of Fayetteville’s city council meetings as a case study, identifying existing obstacles through observation and analysis. Based on interviews with first-time meeting attendees from my primary audience, autoethnography, and behavioral mapping, I will prototype an ecosystem of critique-like tools that empower Gen Z adults—a historically underrepresented demographic in city council meetings—to participate more actively. Ultimately, this case study offers a conceptual framework that could be adapted by designers or non-designers for other municipalities of varying sizes, or other spaces of public discourse.