Tapestry Interventions: Highlights from Emerson College’s Engagement Lab
By: Julia Curbera
Tags: Civic Media, Engagement, Articles, Civictech

Courtesy of Emerson College Engagement Lab (elab.emerson.edu)

I think we need to shift expectations while redoing the work of design, which is working with the organizations having the most impact on the design of spaces wherein people are interacting. That’s media organizations; that’s government organizations; that’s NGOs. That’s the sort of large kind of tapestry of civic organizations that we’re operating within.

-Eric Gordon, Director of the Engagement Lab at Emerson College.

In Season 2 Episode 2 of The Move Podcast, hosts Ayushi Roy and Ceasar McDowell meet Eric Gordon, director of Emerson College’s Engagement Lab. Gordon’s conversation kicks off Season 2’s exploration of the interwoven public and private actors that shape our civic spaces.

In many ways, the work of Emerson’s Engagement Lab is couched in the strengthening of democracy and civic discourse in a time where public trust in government, media, and other private actors that shape everyday our lives are low.

Specifically, the Engagement lab aims to “create opportunities for people to creatively participate in civic life” in all of its forms, while addressing racial, gender, and civic participation disparities in our democracy. Through workshops, research, analog and digital tools, and art and design projects, the Engagement Lab uses a diversity of methods to carry out this work, and is creatively poised to make an impact across Gordon’s stated “tapestry of civic organizations.”

The relationship between the media and the public is an important site of intervention when strengthening the public’s muscle for democracy. This is especially true in our current moment, where trust in media and news organizations to ethically and transparently deliver the foundational facts and frameworks for productive civic discourse has eroded.

As Gordon states in the podcast, it is increasingly necessary not just to “report on, but to report with” members of the public in order to achieve greater trust and transparency in journalism. To address this challenge, Engagement Lab has kicked off its Trust in the News Initiative, comprised of a suite of tools, games, and workshops to build the capacity of news organizations to better engage their audiences.

Civic IDEA is one set of tools within this initiative. Civic IDEA stands for Investigate, Deliberate, Express and Advocate — what the Engagement Lab identifies as “the four building blocks of civic action taking in a digital culture” — and aims to “build the capacity of youth to critique and create media in digital culture.” Civic IDEA includes games like @Stake, where youth can simulate the empathy and creativity needed in processes of collective decision making, and Emerging Citizens, which “teach students how to critique and create civic media” for impact.

The Engagement lab also carries out its mission by building public capacity to both critique and harness the role of data in shaping civic life for good. Civic IDEA’s Databasic tool, for one, provides training and tips for the public to work with data, while the Civic Data Ambassadors program builds the capacity of librarians to work with open data, and use this data to answer questions or challenges in the communities they serve.

At the institutional level, private corporations and governments often use technology and data to make decisions that shape the public realm without meaningful public participation. In contrast, the Engagement Lab’s Civic Smart City toolkit provides a series of “plays” for municipal and community leaders to work with the public in identifying problems in their communities and proposing solutions before technological interventions move forward.

Finally, the Engagement Lab also rightly recognizes the potential for artists and arts institutions to move our civic discourse forward in pursuit of positive change. The lab recently supported the project Boston Coastline Future Past, a “walking data visualization” of Boston’s past, present, and future coastlines by Catherine D’Ignazio and Andi Sutton, as a way to foster public awareness of the threat of sea level rise caused by climate change.

As in any tapestry, the integrity of the whole depends on the strength of individual fabrics and threads. The unwinding of any one thread can compromise the whole. In providing the public and other stakeholders with the capabilities and means by which to think through questions, Emerson’s Engagement Lab strengthens these individuals and groups within the civic fabric.