Alumni Spotlight: Navya Kaur (CDF ‘18)
By: Chris Kuang
Tags: Coding It Forward, Civic Digital Fellowship, Civic Tech, Design, Local Government

Coding it Forward: This summer, you worked as a Design Fellow for the City of Boston. What was that like? What did you work on?

Navya Kaur: My experience with the City of Boston was largely colored by the pandemic. I was working remotely from California for the duration of the fellowship, waking up at 6 a.m. for 9 a.m. Boston meetings. The core of my fellowship centered around graphic design, but I also had the opportunity to propose a social media strategy around COVID-19 communications.

Navya’s logo for the Immigrants Lead Boston initiative

A lot of what I created ended up on the @CityofBoston social media. I’ve always liked the creative aspect of design, but working with the City during these crucial times offered new challenges. I often had extremely quick turnaround times because of changing COVID-19 information or department deadlines. I was typically balancing 3–4 projects at once — all of which were directly impactful. I created logos for a new immigrant advancement initiative, social media graphics relaying re-opening indicators for the city, flyers encouraging students to work as poll workers, and mailers detailing how Boston residents could vote early.

A design encouraging Boston students to sign up to work the polls

Every piece of collateral I created, whether it took 4 days or 4 hours, was important to me because it was important to every Boston resident. I think when you’re designing in a high-impact organization, you can’t help but feel a sense of responsibility and fulfillment in what you’re doing because your work really does matter.

CIF: What were some of the differences working in local government compared to at the federal level, when you were a Civic Digital Fellow?

NK: In terms of comparing my experiences in local and federal government…I could give you 10 pages of notes! It was extremely different. I was fortunate that the City had such a robust design infrastructure in place already and members on the team were willing to invest time in helping me improve. In my experience with the International Trade Administration, I wasn’t able to gain a lot of mentorship within the agency, but the cool thing about the federal government is that it’s so big and chances are you will find someone who has already attempted something you might be trying to do. Coding it Forward does a great job of introducing Fellows to networks like U.S. Digital Service, which not only helped inform my career decisions, but gave me concrete insight and expertise that I could directly apply to my project while I was working with the ITA.

At the end of the day, your experience really just depends on the city or the agency. ITA was using older technology, but Boston was already fairly modernized. I benefited from Boston’s smaller team structure, which gave me freedom to propose my ideas. On the other hand, the federal government had more bureaucracy, but also larger breadth. Ultimately, I think both federal and local government provide impactful work — just on different scales.

CIF: Is there anything you learned or took from the Civic Digital Fellowship that has been helpful as you’ve continued your academic and professional journey?

NK: I think the Civic Digital Fellowship completely contradicted my perception of the role of technology. I went into my fellowship selfishly thinking “Hey, I’m a technologist and government is so slow and has so many problems. I can fix it with my tech and design skills!” While those skills are useful and necessary, CDF showed me that sometimes it isn’t always a technical solution that’s needed. At the ITA, I had to resist the urge to over-tech an idea simply because it was more “innovative.” Maybe you really do need to revamp an entire website, but maybe you just need to help two groups within the agency talk to each other.

This classic conundrum of process change versus technological intervention is informed by deep understanding of a problem. After CDF, where ethics in tech was a constant conversation topic, I began to observe how I very much embodied the “tech-is-the-answer-to-everything” mindset. Unfortunately, this thinking ignored the context a problem was born into and the environment it currently persisted in.

This disconnect between context and execution is why I ended up changing my major from Computer Science to American Studies after I finished the fellowship. CDF’s adamance on impact made me realize that asking the right questions was necessary to successfully create safe solutions. Now, when I’m working on a new project (whether it be in civic tech or not), I’m constantly asking myself: Why is there a problem in the first place and why is a technical solution being proposed? Who is this problem affecting and who will this solution help? It’s a very basic lesson that I think everyone learns when they enter civic tech, but it is an incredibly important one.

CIF: Is there anything else you’d like to share with other young people who are interested in using their design skills for impact?

NK: I think we are at a defining point in history and its ramifications are going to change how we approach impactful design. I think design work has traditionally started with the question, “What can [I or X organization] do for [Y group]?” This focus on the user is a good strategy, but the pandemic and acceleration of the Black Lives Matter movement have demonstrated that designers have an obligation beyond just the user. While users still want to know what an organization will do for them personally, they also want to know what an organization is doing for others.

This community-led design approach indicates that all organizations — whether they be in the financial sector, in the fashion industry, or in government — will not only have to think about the relationship with their users but the relationship between users and their communities. A great example of this is the NBA and WNBA turning their arenas into safe polling locations. I think impact is going to become a central theme going forward in anything that we do…which is really exciting!