Project Analysis · Design Practicum 2 · Spring 2026
A human-centered design industry project with the City of Claremont, treating civic engagement as a product problem: who participates, who gets left out, and what it would take to actually close that gap.
Civic engagement is a product with serious UX problems. Claremont Village is genuinely well-used — its shops, parks, cafés, and open spaces pull in residents, students, retirees, and families. But high foot traffic doesn’t mean equal access. Following a meeting with Claremont’s Mayor and city staff, we were broadly prompted to design a way to increase civic participation in the city, and to find out who’s actually engaging, who isn’t, and what’s creating the friction.
The insight we kept circling back to: most civic engagement products (town halls, public comment periods, city comms) are built for power users, the people who already know the system and feel welcome. Everyone else gets left out by default.
We ran field observation in Claremont Village alongside 6 qualitative interviews across 3 distinct user segments with very different relationships to the city. We started with open-ended questions and as little bias as possible — not looking for stated preferences, but for the unmet needs and mental models people use to make sense of civic participation, told from their perspective.
We had to make a deliberate segment choice before ideating — one of the most important PM decisions in early-stage work, and one that’s easy to skip. We picked the marginalized resident segment, Indigenous and Mexican community members with deep, rational distrust of official channels, because they had the highest unmet need and the fewest existing workarounds.
POV 1 — Belonging. A long-time Indigenous and Mexican resident needs to feel meaningfully included in city-wide decisions, not just culturally represented, because the current structure makes her question whether she truly belongs here.
POV 2 — Power and platform. She needs the broader community to visibly share power and platform Indigenous leadership, because symbolic acknowledgment without real influence makes her feel unseen in her own hometown.
01 — Distrust is a product signal, not a user flaw. When users route around your system, that’s feedback. Designing around distrust means meeting people where trust already exists — peer networks, community events, cultural spaces — rather than trying to rehabilitate institutional credibility.
02 — Format is part of the product. Town halls and public comment periods work for certain users. For this segment, storytelling, art, and music are higher-adoption formats because they match existing mental models of how community works.
03 — Intergenerational connection is an underbuilt feature. Elders sharing experience with younger residents creates legitimacy and continuity no city-run program can manufacture.
04 — Being heard and knowing it mattered is intrinsically motivating. Users don’t need external incentives if the contribution experience feels consequential.
Using our POVs to anchor HMW questions, we generated ideas across effort and impact levels. The discipline here is holding the “but would it work?” instinct until the space is fully explored — I found myself filtering too early during this phase, evaluating feasibility while ideas were still forming.
Two concepts, four rounds. Each test was designed to answer a specific question rather than validate the concept broadly. We tested Prototype 1 with an expert user first, then our primary segment; after two rounds of learning, we transitioned to a second concept to explore a different idea entirely.
“Going in there with more of a positive thing would be better… storytelling is a really good way to do that.”