The year in review: 2013 and the beginning of the Center for Civic Design

In a way, it feels like it happened quickly. One day, we’re doing civic design in our spare time, between commercial contracts. Keeping one foot in civic design, and keeping the other foot with clients in the general practice of user research and user experience design.

And then one day, BOOM! The Center for Civic Design became a thing. A real thing, with incorporation papers and numbers and authorization from the IRS to be a charitable organization as a 50(c)(3).

Though we didn’t always know it, the partners and co-founders Dana Chisnell and Whitney Quesenbery and I have been moving toward this for at least 10 years. The year that made it was 2013. Grants came together. The right people were in the room. The planets aligned.

We work to ensure that voters can vote the way they intend. And 2013 was an exceptional year in that work. Read all about it in our year in review report (PDF).

We are able to do work we love and that we think is important because we have the generous support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the National Science Foundation, and the James Irvine Foundation.

Oh, and stay tuned. We’ve got some exciting plans for 2014.