Civic Designathon: A Civic Iconathon at Code for America’s Summit 2014
If your city had to communicate without words — could it?
Icons transcend language. When communicating without language, you need images. But what happens when there aren’t icons for what you’re trying to say? What happens if you’re trying to tell someone applying for food stamps that they need a birth certificate? How do you say that without words?
The Inspiration
After helping Molly McLeod with the Flyer Design Workshop at Civic Design Camp in April, I saw how fun it is to get a group of people together to produce something quickly. In a conference setting, there is so much listening and sitting. Together with Imanol Aranzadi and Alex Tran, we wanted to make a space to design at this year’s Code for America Summit.
The Mission
We wanted this session to serve 3 purposes:
- Fill a civic need.
- Have a design activity that all skill levels could contribute to.
- Make something any city could use.
Serendipitously, the Code for America health group Clean Project had a list of icon needs for their food stamp project:
When applying for food stamps, there needs to be a way for the basic requirements (social security card, lease, bank statement, utility bill, and birth certificate) to be represented across languages — or without words. But when you looked on the Noun Project* there was nothing for Social Security Card. What is a universal image that can communicate these crucial documents?
We had our mission.
The Procedure
The Civic Designathon took the form of two 45-minute sessions. In the first we introduced the concepts, the needs, and the basic procedure. We focused on sketching a shared iconography for the health icons. We split into groups and started sketching.
We quickly saw patterns in ways of representing, and working together we also drew conclusions about what imagery really communicated the intended noun. Each small group contributed a set of icons they were happy with to a board of sticky notes and at the end of the first session we shared our results.
For the second session we called in the digitizers. Participants experienced with Illustrator or Sketch claimed various icons from the sticky-note collection and began vectorizing the artwork. Meanwhile, other participants kept sketching their civic icon needs with pencil and paper.
The Results
We made a Noun Project account and uploaded the icons as a collection. Everything we uploaded is public domain so anyone is free to use it in their designs — civic or otherwise.
Now when you search ‘Social Security Card’ — there is our result.
Code for America believes that when technologists work with the passionate people of city government, you make cities better. This session was a microcosm of CfA’s mission — we made something together that fills a civic need that everyone can use.
Check out the results here.
We had so much fun doing this. If you want to know how you can replicate it in your city — get in touch. We’d love to come lead a workshop or tell you how you can too!
Ainsley Wagoner, 2014 Fellow — ainsley@codeforamerica.org
Alex Tran, Fellowship Program Manager — atran@codeforamerica.org
Imanol Aranzadi, Puerto Rico Brigade Captain — iiaranzadi@gmail.com
*While there are other sources for icons, we made the choice to use the Noun Project both as an indicator of what there was and was not iconography for, and as the place where we could best distribute the final product to a wide group of users. We think it’s a pretty good tool for both.
