The Institute of Design approached adjunct faculty member and Civic Designer, Stephanie Wade to design an executive level certificate that she could deliver as part of the ID Academy program.

I was part of a two person student team, briefed in to design the structure, content, and class materials that would be both useful and engaging for executives given the capacity most would have while working. This was a remote role and all research and workshops were conducted remotely.

Our research plan was a three stage strategy – firstly we wanted to map out the parameters of the certificate by conducting secondary research into existing executive level certificates, and existing Civic Design classes to gain an understanding of the current offerings. This would help to inform both the content of the curriculum and the structure in terms of what is already available to executives.

The second stage was to reach out to executives in the civic space to understand their needs, wants and capacity – both to identify gaps in their knowledge and skillsets and how to effectively deliver the content in relation to time commitment and engagement capacity. We interviewed a range of executives, mostly working at a local government level, some of whom had experienced an executive level certificate and were able to gain some key qualitative data.

We ran a sprint analysis on this data and created a co-design workshop which we facilitated with Institute of Design faculty to not only understand their approach to delivering the ID Academy executive certificate but to gain insight on their interpretation of Civic Design from a design perspective to inform us of any overlapping methods, skills and mindsets they felt had not been identified in the previous qualitative research.

Our three pronged approach to the researched revealed insights that were essential in informing the structure and content of the curriculum. By beginning with clear research questions before the interviews, we were able to quickly and effectively synthesise and deduce informed answers. Not only were we able to identify knowledge gaps of the participant stakeholders, we were also able to synthesis which elements can make an effective curriculum structure and timeline work efficiently for an executive.

We used agile brainstorming sessions to take our qualitative data and create topic areas that would need to be covered, combining our secondary and primary research information. This formed the beginning of our curriculum outline and led us to our next step – designing each class content.

At each stage of the process, we ensured that we presented our findings to the client – Anijo Mathew, Dean at the Institute of Design to ensure he felt we were on track with the certificate and to gain feedback from his perspective of both Dean and Professor.

Over the course of nine months, we planned, researched and designed the Civic Design Executive Certificate curriculum and delivered the first module of the course. The overall certificate consists of six modules of six, three hour classes, the first of which; Learning and Applying Civic Design Fundamentals, we piloted via Zoom with participants who worked in various local government civic spaces in October.

From surveys conducted after each class and gathering qualitative data during each zoom class, we received an 88% recommendation rate, with 92% of participants feeling like they would bring the learnings into their current role and 83% feeling ready to work on a civic design project after completing the course.

As this project is currently ongoing, the next step will be to begin to build out the content for the other five modules with Institute of Design faculty, including a client sponsored capstone project. We also plan to launch the Fundamentals course in the Summer of 2023.