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Center for Civic Design

Our goal is to make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant. We bring civic design skills in research, usability, design, accessibility, and plain language to improve the voting experience, make elections easier to administer, and encourage participation in elections. Through our work, we have helped hundreds of election officials build their skills and capacity, and touched millions of voters in small but important ways. Across all of our projects, our research suggests that the voter journey—all of the information, decisions, interactions that get a voter from an intention to vote to actually casting a ballot—is a story of seemingly small barriers that can add up to a vote not cast. Our projects and research starts from the causes of those burdens. By smoothing out those barriers, our work can help more people vote, and strengthen democracy.


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A young man holding a smartphone to his ear.

A California church models civil political dialogue through Living Room Conversations, showing how curiosity and listening can bridge divides and strengthen relationships.

Getty Images, Cultura Creative

A Conversation You’ve Been Putting Off?

The Episcopal church in Placerville, California, is not an obvious candidate for political harmony. Its congregation is roughly half conservative and half progressive — a split that, over the past decade, has torn apart faith communities across the country. But this one held together through the pandemic. Through two bruising election cycles and everything else, the congregation’s priest, Debra Sabino, managed to keep their core values front and center. And recently, its members decided they wanted to do more.

Start with what everyone already agrees on

Ken Futernick, co-lead of Bridging Divides El Dorado, was asked to facilitate an event after a recent Sunday service. He began with a simple exercise. He asked people to think about the most important things in their lives — and then to tell the person next to them where their relationships with friends and family ranked on that list.

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Democracy Isn’t Eroding. It’s Evolving. The Question Is: Toward What?
a group of flags

Democracy Isn’t Eroding. It’s Evolving. The Question Is: Toward What?

I fell in love with democracy before I fully understood it.

In high school civics classes in the 1990s, I learned about a system that was imperfect in its origins but evolving toward something better. I believed in that evolution. I believed that democracy, if nurtured, could become more inclusive than the one it started as.

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Macbeth’s Warning: How Ambition and Power Threaten Our Democracy

Engraving of three witches around a bubbling cauldron in a cave summoning an apparition of a rising demon in the background recalling a scene from Shakespeare's Macbeth..Image found in an 1881 book: "Zig Zag Journeys in the Orient" Published by John Wilson & Son, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Getty Images, KenWiedemann

Macbeth’s Warning: How Ambition and Power Threaten Our Democracy

“Something wicked this way comes…” chant the three witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, hailing the former general, now the new king of Scotland.

And indeed, something wicked this way has come to us, in the threat that we are facing to our democracy.

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The American Dream Now Comes with a Higher Price Tag

People protest for "family affordable Housing"

Photo provided

The American Dream Now Comes with a Higher Price Tag

Basma Ahmad leaves her apartment in Arlington, Va., just after 7 a.m., walking a few blocks to a Metro station before catching the train into Washington. By the time she reaches her office downtown, the commute has taken close to an hour.

Ahmad, 25, moved to the United States from Pakistan last year to work in policy research. She shares a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates, and her portion of the rent is about $1,100 a month.

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