Abstract
After uprisings exposed the racial bias of policing in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice committed the city to a process of court-ordered reform. This paper outlines a creative exploration of two design approaches to impacting policymaking and legal reform in this context: a Participant Designer approach that sought to include more people’s lived experience and perspectives in policymaking, and a Speculative approach that worked to reframe the discussion from a problem about policing to an opportunity to imagine new forms of public safety. These approaches explored ways of working inside and alongside the legal system, on one hand synthesizing resident perspectives, on the other allowing them to diverge and conflict. They showed ways of both following and leading participatory processes as a designer.
Keywords
policy design, participation, policing, speculative design
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.438
Citation
Gerber, A. (2022) Designing inside and alongside the system: Working with residents of Ferguson, Missouri on police reform, in Lockton, D., Lenzi, S., Hekkert, P., Oak, A., Sádaba, J., Lloyd, P. (eds.), DRS2022: Bilbao, 25 June - 3 July, Bilbao, Spain. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2022.438
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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
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Research Paper
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Designing inside and alongside the system: Working with residents of Ferguson, Missouri on police reform
After uprisings exposed the racial bias of policing in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, the U.S. Department of Justice committed the city to a process of court-ordered reform. This paper outlines a creative exploration of two design approaches to impacting policymaking and legal reform in this context: a Participant Designer approach that sought to include more people’s lived experience and perspectives in policymaking, and a Speculative approach that worked to reframe the discussion from a problem about policing to an opportunity to imagine new forms of public safety. These approaches explored ways of working inside and alongside the legal system, on one hand synthesizing resident perspectives, on the other allowing them to diverge and conflict. They showed ways of both following and leading participatory processes as a designer.