Dismantling traditional approaches: community-centered design in local government

Abstract Can community-centered design practice create a space to channel creativity into building community, dismantle power structures, and facilitate conversations to create equitable opportunities? This paper investigates how methodologies and tools like community-centered design, qualitative interrogations, and emotional intelligence can give practitioners the tools to reimagine constituents’ relationships with their municipalities. Using community-centered design practice and principles, the author imagines how practitioners can break down privileged perspectives and invite marginalized communities into policy-centered decision-making. While design practice can be an exclusive bubble, just like policy, the intersection of the two has led many cities worldwide to embrace human-centered design. And although Human-centered design can challenge sterile processes, it is often unable to tackle the complexities of power hoarding, marginalization, and other challenges faced by local governments. As a result, it limits design practitioners from approaching obstinate problems and centers power on practitioners’ positionality and decision-making, instead of the communities and individuals impacted by the systemic inadequacies. This paper questions the same by investigating the role of design practitioners in the public sector and community-centered design. Policymaking cannot be innovative or thoughtful without design. Design interrogation in government should embrace vulnerability, transparency, and intentionality. This paper highlights how community-centered designers have the ability and sensitivity to challenge complacent institutions and their lack of human-centered systems. Using case studies from three U.S. cities (Philadelphia, New York, and Baltimore), this paper explores how design gives us mechanisms that can activate a government by the people, of the people, and for the people.


Introduction
With a growing number of public sector innovation labs, and the majority of five hundred inducted in recent years (Cole 2022;Bloomberg Philanthropies 2018, we stand at the intersection of a high influx of design practitioners in government entities. Unfortunately, due to the contested nature and definition of innovation labs (Cole 2022), design practitioners may choose to unilaterally decide whom they get to design for instead of reflecting on the challenges introduced by their products or the needs of the communities impacted by the change (Fathallah and Lewis 2022). The author lays out how design practitioners hold transferred power and agency to dismantle it in the next two sections. More importantly, with inadequate governance approaches unable to respond to emergent issues (Cole 2022), design practice can increase the complexities of how marginalized communities are supported by their local jurisdictions. As a result, both design and policymaking act as systems that perpetuate hierarchical structures and enable power hoarding. Alternatively, design practitioners could serve as the linkage between communities and their institutions, actively imagining how to bridge the existing gaps. In this paper, the author maps out how design as a discipline gravitates toward hoarding power and how practitioners can reimagine their practice to deconstruct power structures.
The key objective of this paper is to initiate a dialogue on what community-centered design looks like in local government, what it might take to build that practice, and the principles we could employ to equalize power dynamics. This paper introduces intentional practices, highlighting the need for reflective approaches, where design practitioners build with values and principles and do not solely rely on traditional innovation-centric approaches. While the paper questions the nature of hyper-innovative and leader-driven solutions, it proposes community-centered design principles and case studies to emphasize the shortcomings of the former approach. The author uses case studies to support the proposed principles they arrived at after closely interacting with individuals practicing community-centered design in different North-Eastern cities of the United States.
Acknowledging that community is an intersection of people, culture, and infrastructure, this paper will use the term community to refer to people. Similarly, wherever mentioned, the words direct service staff indicate frontline workers. Lastly, the paper advocates that community-centered values and principles influence design practitioners to provide them with tools to acknowledge positionality, question, and dismantle power structures through phenomenological interrogation.

Design as a means to hoard power
This paper aims to highlight why design practitioners hold the agency to distribute and dismantle power structures in a policy-centered environment and how they might use the community-centered design principles laid out to distribute power. In Abolish the Cop Inside Your (Designer's) Head, Sarah Fathallah and Ad Sean Lewis (2022) outline that designers yield power by holding the key to methodology and solutions, including ownership of the design and research processes, authorship, access to the people, the ability to assign validity, and accountability. As a result, through these modes of power, designers control research and design outcomes (Fathallah and Lewis 2022). Traditional design methods condition practitioners to believe they possess a lens individualistic to those with a formal design degree while debating that every individual holds the ability to design. In 2018, Natasha Iskander brought to the surface that the pressing issue with design thinking is the lack of ownership in how practitioners tend to conserve and defend the status quo by limiting the flow of power from designer to participants (Iskander 2018).
When design methods are welcomed into the public sector, it is often a way to validate the perspective of those in power--essentially leading to power hoarding. As more practitioners highlight the discipline's challenges in government agencies (Komatsu et al. 2021), there is a considerable lack of reflection on how design thinking in innovation labs does not create the conditions for communities to be uplifted or participate in dialogue about democratic processes. As a result, design practitioners are often at the risk of gatekeeping equitable development with their tools and methods. In actuality, practitioners often lack the agency themselves.
The core concept of empathy in the design thinking process is used to absolve performative research and community engagement practices. Unfortunately, the word and practice of gaining empathy have been bastardized so much that designers rarely willfully surrender their creative power to be empathetic (Fathallah and Lewis 2022). They also surface the reality that political agendas and human biases often shape design projects and solutions. Reimagining the role of design practitioners as civic designers, this paper highlights how individuals can utilize their emotional intelligence to tackle administrative burdens, institutional inequity, and models that continue to privilege white-identifying groups. The paper provides foundational principles, supported by three case studies, that will allow design practitioners to unpack power structures using community-centered design principles and practices.

Design practitioners dismantling power structures
Why must design practitioners interfere as agents and disruptors to locally established power structures? As described above, designers are conditioned to be biased, rather than objective, practitioners (Fathallah and Lewis 2022). van Wynsberghe and Robbins (2014) highlight the many values of a product a designer may have to choose from-esthetic, economic, or ethical-which are all an active part of their decisionmaking. A design practitioner may decide-using the power they hold-to be biased toward a given product's esthetics instead of its ethical implications. When designed objects are used unintentionally, they may manifest and reflect different values. For that reason, design practitioners need to be more ethically motivated to realize the implications of their work to ensure the outcome does not harm communities (van Wynsberghe and Robbins 2014).
This paper proposes three principles that design practitioners may use to break away from their work's esthetic and economic implications, allowing them to respond to the ethical needs of their role and provide avenues for communities to participate in the decision-making process of policies and programs that impact them. It uses community-centered design practices and principles to explain how design practitioners can dismantle and distribute power.
A community-centered designer can consciously question and dismantle existing power structures through intentional practice. One's role as a community-centered designer is not limited to designing artifacts, but also includes evolving the institution's practice to welcome community members and democratize change. A design practitioner's position in community-centered design begins with letting go of attachment and opening the process to individuals with lived experience. By deconstructing the design practice and sharing ownership, community-centered designers can reduce design's role in our lives and liberate the creative process (Fathallah and Lewis 2022). Two of the eleven principles in Abolish the Cop Inside Your (Designer's) Head highlight the critical components of this paper: Challenge the myth that designers are neutral, objective agents. Practice critical self-reflexivity to examine your power, assumptions, and how your values, identities, and positionality affect your work and your relationship with communities. Make it a continuous and ever-evolving practice. (Fathallah and Lewis 2022, 56) Invest in relationship building with and be in service of communities. Work in solidarity with and amplify the power of community-based organizations. Counter dominance behaviors embedded in design "expertise" and practice nonhierarchical ways of working. (Fathallah and Lewis 2022, 56)

Methodology
This paper reflects on how community-centered practice introduces intentionality to the design process, incorporating ethical, just, and transparent deliberations for design practitioners to consider as they create at the intersection of design and policy. The author's interest in further understanding community-centered design in practice in different municipalities emerged after a presentation and panel discussion at the Civic Design Conference 2021, "Shifting Toward Community-Led Innovation in Local Government". The author arrived at the three ideological principles after closely interacting with individuals practicing community-centered design in different North-Eastern cities of the United States. Two questions that motivated the author to codify the lived experiences and principles outlined in this paper were: (1) What primary drivers influence, allow, or restrict civic design practitioners from practicing community-centered design?; (2) How might we translate prototypes of community-centered design into criteria and measures so design practitioners can build on the foundational understanding of community-centered design practice?
In order to formalize the proposed principles, the author utilized qualitative and secondary research methodologies to translate existing practices into theories to exemplify how community-centered design principles can be used as a participatory action research tool to distribute and dismantle power. Since the key motivation of this paper is to share existing practices and document radical contemporary approaches of community-centered innovation, the author first identified the case studies and centered their research on the lived experience, documentation, and expertise of its architects. Any mention of creative collaboration, participatory design, and other design methodologies in the case studies is part of secondary research, and the author relied on the evidence provided by the program designers. To validate and synthesize identified principles, and to present the case studies and principles from a shared lens, the author used literature reviews of articles and literary pieces published by civic design practitioners. Finally, engaging in phenomenological and data-gathering techniques allowed the author to elevate successful prototypes as case studies and their relationship to community-centered principles. So while this paper may convey a linear relationship between each principle and individual case studies, in practice, all case studies reflect all principles in different proportions. Furthermore, although derived from the public sector, the principles can be employed in other spheres of community engagement.

What is community-centered design?
Community-centered design enables us to witness practitioners channel their creativity into transforming perspectives, encouraging peers, and building community and relationships to change the status-quo. In addition, it blends many disciplines, creating a space to evaluate the biases, preconceptions, and influences that can impact the practice of design while being tuned in to the experiences and meaning systems (Maykut and Morehouse 1994).
In traditional design practice, practitioners-typically, policymakers, well-resourced community advocates, or those with longstanding City partnerships-serve as crucial decision-makers, while the people impacted by the policies and services are far removed (Cortez et al. 2021). Community-centered design, in contrast, acknowledges the reality of individuals who are most proximate to the challenges, and could participate in the co-design and decision-making process to create true impact. The following case studies evaluate how Community-Centered Designers reversed the traditional roles to prioritize the lived experience of individuals living in the community one is designing for.

Using community-centered design principles for intentional advocacy
Since design practitioners play an incredible range of roles in the public sectorfrom user experience design to researcher, developer, and program manager-they are essential to how we question existing oppressive structures. Furthermore, since design practitioners are new to the policy and governance space, there is a significant opportunity to define a design practitioner's role in developing community and governance relationships. The case studies embodying a community-centered design approach presented here suggest three key principles for improving the practice of design: 1. Understand historical evidence and acknowledge institutional oppression to ground civic engagement in opportunities to care, trust, and build communities.
2. Move away from hyper-innovative and leader-driven solutions to create space and identify the community's needs. 3. Be an agent to dismantle power structures by bringing community and direct service staff to decision-making.

First principle
3.1. Understand historical evidence and institutional oppression to ground civic engagement in opportunities to care, trust, and build communities The pandemic has showcased the integral nature of local government. As a result, local government, while a microcosm, is the frontage of governance for individuals. It retains the power to marginalize, oppress, or liberate the people it serves. The trust one puts in their local government comes from the history one may have shared, and that is where we see a considerable representation gap. Individuals are still being oppressed and marginalized in many parts of the country. It is imperative that local government brings intentionality in its work and policies to address the institutional oppression it has facilitated for generations. In order to accomplish this, institutions must reflect on how they can create space for equal voice and consideration when individuals are at different levels (Brown 2017).
While there is a push to center and engage the community in the civic design field, if the conditions for community-centered design are not in place, then the costs of engaging the community can outweigh the benefits (Cortez et al. 2021). Questioning the needs and intentionality of projects is an integral principle of community-centered design. In this instance, design practitioners may better evaluate and serve community members' needs by weighing the interests of the institution, the emotional labor of the community, and the historical context. That said, thinking through the lens of historical evidence may indicate, at times, that engaging the community in specific projects will be theatrical. In which case, the design practitioner may need to step back instead of imposing on the communities and potentially harming the relationship between the government and the people.
3.1.1. Case study 01: Equitable community engagement toolkit This case informs the formation of a principal understanding of the historical context to ground civic engagement in care and trust as the team centers the foundation of the toolkit by acknowledging the relationship between Philadelphia and its communities. The project, still in progress, has taken the time to understand the nuances of history to reflect on the speculations of community engagement.
3.1.1.1. Challenge. The Philadelphia Service Design Studio collaborated with the Mayor's Office of Civic Engagement and Volunteer Service to develop a tool that effectively bridges the language, disability, and digital access gaps residents face when interacting with the City. The Service Design Studio is a team of design researchers and service designers within the Office of the Chief Administrative Officer. They collaborate with residents, frontline staff, and policymakers to design accessible, equitable, trauma-informed services.
While the team is creating the toolkit, the process emphasizes design practitioners' contemporary roles in building an honest dialogue. Philadelphia's Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit is a prime example of community-centered design. It forges the role design can play in recreating relationships with communities that have been overlooked.
The Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit is grounded in hyper-localized efforts and an understanding of the government's historical role in marginalizing communities. The team firmly believes that in a democratic system, communities should be engaged in building their futures. Community engagement for Philadelphia's Service Design Studio is a means to bring in those who have vastly been ignored (CodeforAmerica, 2021)..
3.1.1.2. Action. One of the participants from community workshops stated, "Interactions between communities and government … are impersonal and can feel inhuman." The Philadelphia Service Design Studio used its community engagement sessions to discuss the language, disability, and digital access issues residents face when interacting with the City and have worked on addressing those barriers (Reese 2021). To lay the foundation of their toolkit, the team has reflected on the relationship that Philadelphia has with its residents, acknowledged the generational trauma the government has imposed on communities, and built with patience, not from a productivity-centric perspective. As 'innovators' in the government sector, building at a pace that facilitates trust is difficult, and that is where Philadelphia's team has focused extensively. The team asks how they can create conditions for trust between the government and the communities they serve--knowing past and present? (Reese 2021) Through this process and project, the team intentionally assesses if the conditions support them to bring in the communities. During the research, many practitioners may not consider the emotional labor of working with their research and project participants or the imposition on them. However, Philadelphia's Service Design Studio underscores the importance of the following questions, if we are to engage in a dialogue with the community, we must question: 1. Is there a desire, willingness, or commitment by project partners to engage in a community-centered design process? 2. Is there a political will to listen and act on what the community shares? 3. Is there enough time to learn from the community's history, share what they heard, and build relationships to respond to community needs?
3.1.1.3. Outcome. The team defines its Equitable Community Engagement Toolkit as a collection of best practices, principles, and tools rather than publications or limited recommendations. While still in its execution phase, the toolkit provides instruments to Philadelphia City Departments where they can evaluate existing policies to amend them. A few selected insights from this process have manifested in the following ways: Firstly, since community members are offering their expertise and knowledge and serving as community representatives, one of the critical practices highlighted in the toolkit outlines how departments might compensate community members for their time and efforts, similar to how the government pays external consultants for lending their expertise.
Secondly, the toolkit acknowledges that community engagement may look different from standard design approaches, and emphasizes that the approaches can encompass a spectrum of activities rather than follow a prescribed method cheat sheet. However, the spectrum should focus on channeling more agency and power to communities who share their experience.
Lastly, one of the most significant parts of this toolkit is its open-source nature, which challenges the secretive nature of the government, where only a limited set of artifacts live in the institution. The team focuses on the learning that community-centric efforts must democratize knowledge and transfer power in order to be sustainable, and is driven to make the process of developing the toolkit available for all.

Move away from hyper-innovative and leader-driven solutions to create space to identify the community's needs
Iskander draws attention to the fact that design thinking typically follows a problemsolving rational-experimental model from the 1970s and 1980s (Iskander 2018). Managers and policymakers enthusiastically accept both models, one being rationalexperimental and the second being design thinking, promising to reshape firms and governments. However, both models focus more on processes than on the people who experience them. As a result, the current models in the public innovation labs tend to focus on preserving and serving a leader's vision rather than on catering to the communities they will impact.
Community-centered design challenges who policymaking chooses to include or exclude to increase intentionality at each step of the process. Currently, design practitioners in the public sector are encouraged to design solutions and programs that address everyone-but real life is complicated, and such an approach is not always feasible or successful. A one-size-fits-all approach does not encourage or support practitioners in acknowledging and addressing people's preexisting issues and daily concerns.
The key to dismantling the existing power structures lies in breaking down the traditional roles that policymakers and designers have played in creating services and programs, in an effort to create more equitable spaces and conversations.

Case study 02: Designed by community
This case informs the formation of the principle that moving away from leader-driven solutions can create space for communities by highlighting the importance of centering intentionality on how and when communities can be brought into the process. As a result, the act of centering communities examines leader-centric and hyper-innovative frameworks. The NYC Service Design Studio believes that community-centered design is an effort to valorize and advocate the needs, desires, and expertise of those with lived experience who have been working to uplift their communities long before innovation-driven practitioners entered the room (Cortez et al. 2021).
4.1.1.1. Challenge. NYC's Service Design Studio, part of the Mayor's Office for Economic Opportunity, has been a leader in democratizing civic tools and tactics for design practitioners working in other local governments. In the studio, the designers seek to move away from the traditional role of designers as holders of expertise, and toward an approach where they serve instead as facilitators. Their program, Designed by Community, is a paid fellowship and project funding opportunity to support community members in designing and developing hyper-localized solutions related to the COVID-19 crisis (NYC Opportunity 2021). The team is currently inviting proposals for the second round of prototyping, an opportunity similar to the first cohort, which ran from April to August 2021. The first cohort, in partnership with TakeRoot Justice, focused on New York City's Housing Authority (NYCHA) to reimagine the agency's recovery from COVID. One of the eight fellows that participated in the program aptly describes his perspective: When we first started, I thought the design was a closed-off process, focused on the person or the people who are taking up the anchor to create something. What I learned about design after going through this process is all the people you need to include in the process, such as all the people who will be impacted by what you are creating. (NYC Opportunity 2021) The quote exemplifies the fact that the discipline of design has, historically, been exclusive. However, NYC's Service Design Studio has taken it upon itself to disseminate design methods as tools to inform community-centered innovation.
4.1.1.2. Action. The studio partnered with TakeRoot Justice's Equitable Neighborhoods Practice Area to support outreach, selection, initial scoping, and program delivery. The total funding package was broken down into three categories: (1) Living and Learning, which focused on compensating individual fellows for their time and emotional work; (2) Community Research Incentive Funds, which focused on compensating community members that were involved in the development of the projects; and (3) Project Implementation Funds, which were set aside to prototype and implement projects. With an intentional distribution of the funds, the program aims to: Support the development of community-designed solutions Strengthen the teams' partnership with community leaders Enhance "designed by" processes by coaching individuals during the fellowship Increase the capacity of community members to use design-enhanced tools The NYC Service Design Studio used the Designed by Community Fellowship Program to engage meaningfully with communities and individuals. This model allows the government to take a step back and center community leaders in imagining the future of their communities. While conventional design processes strive for perfectionism, the team focuses on letting go of traditional roles by taking the lead as a facilitator and not a designer. So, while letting go of traditional roles can cause unease, NYC Service Design Studio is practicing sitting with discomfort and design skepticism to build an intentional and trauma-informed design process.
4.1.1.3. Outcome. The studio uses the Designed by Community program as a way to learn about the communities their government needs to engage with. The program follows the structure of: setting the stage ! talking to people ! connecting the dots ! planning it out. Through Designed by Community, the fellows were able to design and launch four programs. Marquis Jenkins, one of the fellows, remarked, There's an old saying: Give a man a fish he eats for a day, teach a man to fish and eat for a lifetime. This fellowship really embodies that. You could have taken the money and created your own project for public housing residents. But you took a step back and said, How can I be most impactful? How can I make sure this program reaches the largest, widest audience?
You guys have made magic. Not just in this room, but in the projects we all are working on and the impact it is going to have throughout public housing and what it is going to do for public housing residents entirely. (NYC Opportunity 2021).
As highlighted in the quote, the intentionality of a community-centered approach showcases how a community may start reconsidering the relationship they have with the government. NYC's Service Design Studio focused on sharing their methods while supporting community members to build something on their own, which has enabled the studio to facilitate program creation while informing how individuals can further obtain agency and be empowered to enact change.

Third principle
5.1. Be an agent to dismantle power structures by bringing community and direct service staff to decision-making The role of a design practitioner in community-centered design is to reverse power structures, center communities, and encourage policymakers to build a more resilient relationship between the communities and government bodies. Because the rise of public innovation labs has focused on highly productive and analytical models that echo the expert and credential-oriented model of governance, the community-oriented practitioner should assume the responsibility to question the intention of policies and introduce qualitative metrics and emotional intelligence in order to redesign the way policies are structured.
Since change starts small, this third principle encourages design practitioners to recognize the power structures at play and how they impact the integrity of the design process. Although certain institutions disseminate powers to underserved communities, many of them lack awareness of how they hold onto archaic practices. This, ideally, provides an opportunity for a community-centered designer to acknowledge, question, and dismantle power silos by inviting a larger group of individuals into a conversation.
It can be intimidating to bring a wide range of individuals together to develop codesigned opportunities and solutions. In practice, though, the core of this principle lies in taking a step back from being a facilitator, instead taking on the role of a listener. When listeners bring in individuals to hear their stories and learn from them, they have to be as vulnerable as the storyteller. Hence, as community-centered designers think about dismantling power structures and bringing communities and governments together, they have to be ready to be uncomfortable, authentic, and critical of themselves, their approaches, and their intentions at every turn-characteristics in direct opposition to those often instilled in design practitioners through their training.

Case study 03: DesignXPeople
This case informs the formation of a principle that encourages design practitioners to embrace the agency to dismantle power structures by bringing community members and direct service staff into decision-making processes. It does so by highlighting the role reversal of traditional decision-making to identify community members and direct service staff as innovation architects.
5.1.1.1. Challenge. Identifying the traditional processes in policy and government, the Design by People (DesignXPeople) initiative focuses on inviting residents with expertise in design and research to serve as volunteer fellows, supporting their local government in identifying and improving solutions that, previously, had only been evaluated from a hierarchical perspective. The initiative creates a space to reimagine the future of local governance to build reliance, explore problems with public servants, and design for a more inclusive, equitable, and thoughtful future. This initiative was prototyped in Montgomery County, Maryland, and the author of this paper led the second cohort. While the program's initial intent was to increase the capacity of the given department partner, in its second prototype, DesignXPeople questioned how community members could design the solutions, with direct service staff taking on the role of reviewers and consultants to the project. 5.1.1.2. Action. The focus of DesignXPeople is to build an educational relationship between the two, volunteering fellows and local government agencies, for which the team asks how they facilitate and increase creative collaboration between residents and government. DesignXPeople focuses on the critical principles of embracing complexity, learning from experience, centering humans, and starting small to position residents as change-makers and resources. Selected fellows reimagine small parts of local government services and systems over four months. At its core, DesignXPeople seeks to foster a culture that builds with and by people, not for them. So while each cohort of volunteers is different, the team attempts to maintain the following approach: Fellows learn from the experience of public servants before proposing solutions and create space for stakeholders to generate prospective solutions with them.
Direct service staff and fellows work together to make the invisible visible throughout the process, highlighting challenges and success stories. Because sustainability is always an issue with volunteer-driven programs, the initiative encourages fellows to consider how the service would continue once they are retracted as resources and how the partner department would implement changes.
Equity creates avenues to address systemic complacency; justice takes the vision forward by providing an opportunity to fix the systems. DesignXPeople attempts to create a space for justice by engaging everyone in the process and allowing the design practice to be more just and human. The key feature of this initiative is role reversal: residents or community members participate as innovation architects, learn from the experiences of direct service staff, create artifacts in collaboration with each other, and facilitate the space to reimagine the needs of existing services. 5.1.1.3. Outcome. In the most recent prototype, the fellows conducted secondary and primary research with direct service staff to identify gaps in creating knowledge-based articles (KBA) that communicate government services in Montgomery County. The fellows collaborated with Montgomery County Government's 311 customer service representatives to understand the challenges they face and the nature of their calls. Direct service staff like the customer service representatives are seldom involved in the content generation of the information they use to answer customer calls. For more effective conversations between 311 and residents, KBAs could be written from the representatives' perspectives, if not the residents, to ensure public services are more easily accessible to those in need. The fellows focused on learning from the lived experience of the direct service staff to codify best practices. They developed a guide for stakeholders to write KBAs, emphasizing clear communication between residents and representatives. DesignXPeople, though in its nascent stages, questions what process improvements may look like and how design practitioners can develop more community-centered deliverables by welcoming direct service staff and users in the design process.

Practicing community-centered design
Design practitioners have an increasingly difficult job. To make lasting change in local government, practitioners have to reimagine existing design processes and learn from lived experience of those most impacted by the challenges. While policymakers cannot choose who uses government services, design practitioners can employ community-centered design to ensure the services they design take users and their needs into consideration. In addition to prioritizing racial equity, facilitating and creating space for diverse voices, and building agency, design practitioners must: 1. Understand historical evidence and acknowledge institutional oppression to ground civic engagement in opportunities to care, trust, and build communities.
2. Move away from hyper-innovative and leader-driven solutions to create space and identify the community's needs. 3. Be an agent to dismantle power structures by bringing community and direct service staff to decision-making.
As demonstrated in the case studies, these principles are pillars of how design practitioners can question their ability to exercise power, identify where power is accumulated, and break it down through community-centered initiatives and processes. Delving into the past, present, and future, the outline above is intended to add value and thought to design practice in government instead of introducing yet another diagrammatic framework that may lack scalability. Since communities are individualistic, they require an approach designed for them and not for the benefit of a monolithic vision of government.
Why do we need community-centered design? Freire (1921Freire ( -1997 advocates that revolutionary leadership must practice co-intentional education and also posits that only the oppressed can lead to the liberation of the oppressed. The strength of liberation comes from a transference of power to those who have not had access to it.
As individuals or peoples, by fighting for the restoration of their humanity, they will be attempting the restoration of true generosity. Who is better prepared than the oppressed to understand the terrible significance of an oppressive society? Who suffers the effects of oppression more than the oppressed? Who can better understand the necessity of liberation? (Freire 1921(Freire -1997 For too long, governance has been a source of oppression and marginalization. With individuals and communities suffering through generational pain and inequity, it is critical to reimagine who has been making policies and why the process is not more collaborative. The sterile institutions we work for do not provide the freedom to question their authoritative nature; it is in this space that community-centered design can serve as a mechanism to increase accountability for those in power. Its principles attempt to acknowledge that communities actively seek participation in a dialogue with their governments. While evaluating the role of a qualitative researcher, often played by civic designers, Dwyer and Buckle (2009) wrote that the time has come to abandon existing structures to embrace the complexity of perspectives (Dwyer and Buckle 2009

Conclusion
Design practitioners are conditioned to concentrate power with themselves and within their institutions. Yet a number of practices can be employed to break out of prescribed traditional approaches to shift toward a value, principle, and communitycentered practice. Community-centered design is a means to more equitable and intentional policies, practices, and programs.
As illustrated in this paper, a community-centered practice enables design practitioners to reflect and increase intentionality in their practice, and to channel their power and agency to marginalized communities. By following the three proposed principles, design practitioners in civic engagement can use their positionality to acknowledge historical oppression, critique existing practices, and widen the table to create a space of equity of voice. A community and value-centric practice enables us to question where power lies, and acknowledging the imbalance of said structures will help us to eventually dismantle them.