Design for City Planning: Cultivating Planners’ Interest in Adopting Design Methods in Planning Meetings

This thesis project explores opportunities of bringing human-centered design methodologies to long- term city planning, a policymaking process with a framework that resembles the divergent-convergent double-diamond framework of design thinking but with executions that allow little ambiguity and iteration—key principles of human-centered design. In particular, the thesis investigates “meetings” as a particular context in which design methodologies can be introduced and utilized.
The thesis includes three core findings: (1) contextual factors that contributed to the success and failure of long-term city planning processes adopting non-conventional approaches; (2) pain points and elements of inefficiencies in planning meetings; and (3) design elements that attract and motivate city planners to adopt new (design) approaches. Together, the findings can inform designers or planners to better garner interest in human-centered design and to maximize success of applying design methods in planning meetings.
The thesis ultimately proposed a social experience that introduces these core findings through game play and post-game activities. The final product—“The Death and Life of Great Planning Meetings”—is a multi-player card game and facilitation tool designed for planners, designers, and anyone who has been involved in planning meetings to discover their institutional capacity for human-centered design.