Eric Gordon
Professor Gordon's research focuses on emergent, values-based governance structures in the smart city and the ethics of data access and sharing. Additionally, for the last ten years, Professor Gordon has explored how game systems and playful processes can augment traditional modes of civic participation. He has served as an expert advisor for local and national governments, as well as NGOs around the world, designing responsive processes that help organizations transform to meet their stated values. He has created over a dozen games for public sector use and advised organizations on how to build their own inclusive and meaningful processes. He is the author of two books about media and cities (The Urban Spectator (2010) and Net Locality (2011)) and is the editor of Civic Media: Technology, Design, Practice (MIT Press, 2016) and Ludics: Play as Humanistic Inquiry (Palgrave, 2021). His most recent monograph, Meaningful Inefficiencies: Civic Design in an Age of Digital Expediency (Oxford University Press, 2020) examines practices in government, journalism and NGOs that reimagine civic innovation beyond efficiency.
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Books by Eric Gordon
This report documents the urban transition of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a mid-size intermediary city in Eastern Europe. In 2019, a collective of urban innovators began asking what would happen if a different set of values were guiding urban transitions. What if goals of wellbeing were prioritized over economic growth? What if care were prioritized over efficiency? What if the cultivation of trust was more important than expediency? OurCluj was created with the goal of exploring these critical questions. It is a geographically localized innovation cluster that takes the shape of a multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary “living laboratory” optimized for the enhanced wellbeing of the city’s young residents, who are considered to hold the key to a better future. Living laboratories are usually focused on specific innovations like transport, energy systems, tourism or education. Instead, OurCluj focuses on wellbeing, which substantially alters the shape and function of the living laboratory structure. We call this unique arrangement a “Values Based Urban Living Laboratory” (or VBULL), and we describe why activating values of care and trust is necessary.
This research demonstrates that urban transitions are not only a matter of who gets funding and how arrangements are governed, but also, and perhaps most importantly, how narratives change. What stories are getting told about the future? What stories need to be told about the past? And how do people model democratic transitions through their everyday actions? We describe the work of the VBULL in three parts:
Imagining possible urban futures
Reflecting on the history of past harms; and
Exploring novel practices that promote power sharing
Included in the report are 10 design recommendations for practitioners to catalyze VBULLs in their places. These include methods for trust building, storytelling, learning, transparency and accountability. Each design recommendation has practical examples and references that can serve as inspirations. A glossary at the end of the report provides the most commonly used terms when practicing urban transitions.
The research was conducted in spring 2020, just at the beginning of the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, by a team from Romania, Switzerland, and the United States, in support of Fondation Botnar’s OurCity initiative. Nearly 30 participants in OurCluj were interviewed, and each interview was creatively documented by artists from the Cluj-based Artivistory Collective. The resulting artworks were shared with interviewees, and their responses substantively informed the insights of this report. The artworks are displayed throughout this report. They should be seen not as an illustration of the text, but as an additive interpretive element to the findings. In an additional set of full color posters within the print addition, there is an interactive exercise that demonstrates how art and its interpretation can serve as a creative catalyst for the formation and the maintenance of VBULLs.
Meaningful Inefficiencies is about the practices undertaken by civic designers that challenge the normative applications of "smart technologies" in order to build or repair trust with publics. Based on over sixty interviews with change makers in public serving organizations throughout the United States, as well as detailed case studies, this book provides a practical and deeply philosophical picture of civic life in transition. The designers in this book are not professional designers, but practitioners embedded within organizations who have adopted an approach to public engagement Eric Gordon and Gabriel Mugar call "meaningful inefficiencies," or the deliberate design of less efficient over more efficient means of achieving some ends. This book illustrates how civic designers are creating meaningful inefficiencies within public serving organizations. It also encourages a rethinking of how innovation within these organizations is understood, applied, and sought after. Different than market innovation, civic innovation is not just about invention and novelty; it is concerned with building communities around novelty, and cultivating deep and persistent trust.
At its core, Meaningful Inefficiencies underlines that good civic innovation will never just involve one single public good, but must instead negotiate a plurality of publics. In doing so, it creates the conditions for those publics to play, resulting in people truly caring for the world. Meaningful Inefficiencies thus presents an emergent and vitally needed approach to creating civic life at a moment when smart and efficient are the dominant forces in social and organizational change.
media, news organizations of all kinds are
searching for ways to build better relationships with the communities they serve. This report highlights trust-building innovations
that involve relational journalism: journalism
that focuses on enriching reporting by engaging with people as members of communities, not just as “audiences.”
Growing attention to community relationships is happening against a backdrop of eroding trust in the media. Recent research suggests
that the public is looking for greater authenticity, transparency, positivity, and diversity in the news and a sense of shared mission
between communities and news organizations. Relational journalism can be a critical trust-building innovation, offering media organizations a path toward greater trust and therefore greater sustainability. This report describes the background work that goes into creating that kind of news, and offers journalists an evaluative tool to capture the
effectiveness of the work.
Even as many media organizations are working to address the crisis of public trust, they are often not doing the work of building
internal capacity, establishing metrics for success, or crafting compelling narratives to connect the programmatic work of the newsroom to the work of building trusting relationships with the communities they serve.
In short, most organizations lack adequate resources and training, not to mention the organizational and cultural buy-in, to do authentic engagement work.
This report shows how news organizations can build capacity to more effectively engage the communities they serve. It presents a constructive evaluation tool we call the Reflective Practice Guide (RPG). The RPG
offers a set of concepts and a process for documenting and reflecting on community engagement efforts and impacts, so that journalists and the organizations they work for will be better able to build accurate and
complete narratives around the value of doing engagement work. As journalists continue to carve out a space for relational journalism in their practice, articulating the value of the work to stakeholders, audiences, managers and funders will be essential, particularly because it often requires different skills than traditional journalistic work. In short, the RPG
provides a way to measure work that is often novel to news organizations and difficult to quantify.
The tool was refined through a project called Finding Common Ground—a collaboration of the Agora Journalism Center and The Engagement Lab, with support from The Robert Bosch Foundation, the News Integrity
Initiative, and Zeit Online. Seven project teams were selected to join a cohort of journalists willing to “think out loud” about their engagement practice in order to refine the evaluation tool. The project leaders learned new ways to create more meaningful engagement with
their communities, and learned how to better
anticipate the kinds of work that meaningful
engagement requires. The questions posed
in the RPG invite journalists to identify the
texture of four basic activities in their community engagement work: Network Building,
Holding Space for Discussion, Distributing
Ownership, and providing for Persistent Input.
As the illustrations in this report show, the
RPG encourages journalists to articulate what
they are doing to build community engagement and why they are doing it. It aids in
the identification of challenges and provides
insights into how to overcome them. And
it helps journalists speak with their peers,
superiors, and funders about the value of
engaging communities in the practice of
news making.
The four activities described in the report can
create the kinds of journalistic behaviors and
news content that audiences see as markers
of trustworthiness. The activities shared in
this report and the instrument provided for
journalists to evaluate them provide a potential
roadmap for media to build greater trust with
the communities they serve.
This guide captures learning from the experiences of five city governments, and from a variety of departments, across the United States who are members of the City Accelerator initiative, which is a collaboration between Living Cities and the Citi Foundation established in 2015. City officials from Albuquerque, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Seattle participated in an eighteen-month program to design and implement projects that engage lower income residents on various issues ranging from re-entry services to public health campaigns. Each city was awarded $100,000 over the life of the project. The cities received technical assistance and guidance from the Engagement Lab, an applied research lab based at Emerson College in Boston working on reimagining civic engagement in a digital culture, through monthly conference calls and quarterly convenings to hone their approaches. (See Appendix 2 for the overarching goals of the City Accelerator cohort on Public Engagement).
In addition to detailing the work of these five cities, this guide provides a background on public engagement and offers practical and detailed approaches for city officials nationwide to use when planning engagement processes. With this guide, you will: learn about the crucial concept of co-production as a frame for public engagement; Understand, through real world examples, the complexity of effective communication and relationship building; learn how to balance the key ingredients of a successful public engagement process, including creativity, inclusivity, and transparency; be taken through a step-by-step process, grounded in design-thinking methods, of planning a public engagement process.
There is no one-size-fits-all public engagement tool or technique (See Appendix 1 for a list of existing toolkits). Approaches to public engagement must continually adapt and evolve along with the communities they serve. As such, this guide walks you through best practices for how to manage the ever-changing landscape of public engagement.
The contributors set out the conceptual context for the intersection of civic and media; examine the pressure to innovate and the sustainability of innovation; explore play as a template for resistance; look at civic education; discuss media-enabled activism in communities; and consider methods and funding for civic media research. The case studies that round out each section range from a "debt resistance" movement to government service delivery ratings to the "It Gets Better" campaign aimed at combating suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. The book offers a valuable interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of the increasingly influential space of civic media.
* Describes net locality as an emerging form of location awareness central to all aspects of digital media, from mobile phones to online maps to location-based social networks and games
* Warns of the dangers that these technologies can present while also outlining the opportunities and the potential for pro-social developments
* Provides a theory of the web, not just mobile devices
Papers by Eric Gordon
between civic initiatives and institutional approaches often make it challenging for the former to become sustainable and increase their impact. We therefore explored how civic design could enhance the significance of local civic initiatives within institutional settings. The vivid conversation rendered three key orientations in civic design: 1) operating from within the community, 2) focusing on the interaction between civic initiatives and governmental and academic institutions, and 3) taking a transformational perspective on the interplay between civil society and its institutional
context in the information age. We identified prompting questions on four important topics, primarily related to the second orientation: listening to citizens, fostering collaborative relationships, ensuring continuity through funding, and scaling or spreading local civic initiatives. These questions contribute to the agenda for next steps on the role of civic design.
This report documents the urban transition of Cluj-Napoca, Romania, a mid-size intermediary city in Eastern Europe. In 2019, a collective of urban innovators began asking what would happen if a different set of values were guiding urban transitions. What if goals of wellbeing were prioritized over economic growth? What if care were prioritized over efficiency? What if the cultivation of trust was more important than expediency? OurCluj was created with the goal of exploring these critical questions. It is a geographically localized innovation cluster that takes the shape of a multi-sectoral, multi-disciplinary “living laboratory” optimized for the enhanced wellbeing of the city’s young residents, who are considered to hold the key to a better future. Living laboratories are usually focused on specific innovations like transport, energy systems, tourism or education. Instead, OurCluj focuses on wellbeing, which substantially alters the shape and function of the living laboratory structure. We call this unique arrangement a “Values Based Urban Living Laboratory” (or VBULL), and we describe why activating values of care and trust is necessary.
This research demonstrates that urban transitions are not only a matter of who gets funding and how arrangements are governed, but also, and perhaps most importantly, how narratives change. What stories are getting told about the future? What stories need to be told about the past? And how do people model democratic transitions through their everyday actions? We describe the work of the VBULL in three parts:
Imagining possible urban futures
Reflecting on the history of past harms; and
Exploring novel practices that promote power sharing
Included in the report are 10 design recommendations for practitioners to catalyze VBULLs in their places. These include methods for trust building, storytelling, learning, transparency and accountability. Each design recommendation has practical examples and references that can serve as inspirations. A glossary at the end of the report provides the most commonly used terms when practicing urban transitions.
The research was conducted in spring 2020, just at the beginning of the disruption caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, by a team from Romania, Switzerland, and the United States, in support of Fondation Botnar’s OurCity initiative. Nearly 30 participants in OurCluj were interviewed, and each interview was creatively documented by artists from the Cluj-based Artivistory Collective. The resulting artworks were shared with interviewees, and their responses substantively informed the insights of this report. The artworks are displayed throughout this report. They should be seen not as an illustration of the text, but as an additive interpretive element to the findings. In an additional set of full color posters within the print addition, there is an interactive exercise that demonstrates how art and its interpretation can serve as a creative catalyst for the formation and the maintenance of VBULLs.
Meaningful Inefficiencies is about the practices undertaken by civic designers that challenge the normative applications of "smart technologies" in order to build or repair trust with publics. Based on over sixty interviews with change makers in public serving organizations throughout the United States, as well as detailed case studies, this book provides a practical and deeply philosophical picture of civic life in transition. The designers in this book are not professional designers, but practitioners embedded within organizations who have adopted an approach to public engagement Eric Gordon and Gabriel Mugar call "meaningful inefficiencies," or the deliberate design of less efficient over more efficient means of achieving some ends. This book illustrates how civic designers are creating meaningful inefficiencies within public serving organizations. It also encourages a rethinking of how innovation within these organizations is understood, applied, and sought after. Different than market innovation, civic innovation is not just about invention and novelty; it is concerned with building communities around novelty, and cultivating deep and persistent trust.
At its core, Meaningful Inefficiencies underlines that good civic innovation will never just involve one single public good, but must instead negotiate a plurality of publics. In doing so, it creates the conditions for those publics to play, resulting in people truly caring for the world. Meaningful Inefficiencies thus presents an emergent and vitally needed approach to creating civic life at a moment when smart and efficient are the dominant forces in social and organizational change.
media, news organizations of all kinds are
searching for ways to build better relationships with the communities they serve. This report highlights trust-building innovations
that involve relational journalism: journalism
that focuses on enriching reporting by engaging with people as members of communities, not just as “audiences.”
Growing attention to community relationships is happening against a backdrop of eroding trust in the media. Recent research suggests
that the public is looking for greater authenticity, transparency, positivity, and diversity in the news and a sense of shared mission
between communities and news organizations. Relational journalism can be a critical trust-building innovation, offering media organizations a path toward greater trust and therefore greater sustainability. This report describes the background work that goes into creating that kind of news, and offers journalists an evaluative tool to capture the
effectiveness of the work.
Even as many media organizations are working to address the crisis of public trust, they are often not doing the work of building
internal capacity, establishing metrics for success, or crafting compelling narratives to connect the programmatic work of the newsroom to the work of building trusting relationships with the communities they serve.
In short, most organizations lack adequate resources and training, not to mention the organizational and cultural buy-in, to do authentic engagement work.
This report shows how news organizations can build capacity to more effectively engage the communities they serve. It presents a constructive evaluation tool we call the Reflective Practice Guide (RPG). The RPG
offers a set of concepts and a process for documenting and reflecting on community engagement efforts and impacts, so that journalists and the organizations they work for will be better able to build accurate and
complete narratives around the value of doing engagement work. As journalists continue to carve out a space for relational journalism in their practice, articulating the value of the work to stakeholders, audiences, managers and funders will be essential, particularly because it often requires different skills than traditional journalistic work. In short, the RPG
provides a way to measure work that is often novel to news organizations and difficult to quantify.
The tool was refined through a project called Finding Common Ground—a collaboration of the Agora Journalism Center and The Engagement Lab, with support from The Robert Bosch Foundation, the News Integrity
Initiative, and Zeit Online. Seven project teams were selected to join a cohort of journalists willing to “think out loud” about their engagement practice in order to refine the evaluation tool. The project leaders learned new ways to create more meaningful engagement with
their communities, and learned how to better
anticipate the kinds of work that meaningful
engagement requires. The questions posed
in the RPG invite journalists to identify the
texture of four basic activities in their community engagement work: Network Building,
Holding Space for Discussion, Distributing
Ownership, and providing for Persistent Input.
As the illustrations in this report show, the
RPG encourages journalists to articulate what
they are doing to build community engagement and why they are doing it. It aids in
the identification of challenges and provides
insights into how to overcome them. And
it helps journalists speak with their peers,
superiors, and funders about the value of
engaging communities in the practice of
news making.
The four activities described in the report can
create the kinds of journalistic behaviors and
news content that audiences see as markers
of trustworthiness. The activities shared in
this report and the instrument provided for
journalists to evaluate them provide a potential
roadmap for media to build greater trust with
the communities they serve.
This guide captures learning from the experiences of five city governments, and from a variety of departments, across the United States who are members of the City Accelerator initiative, which is a collaboration between Living Cities and the Citi Foundation established in 2015. City officials from Albuquerque, Atlanta, Baltimore, New Orleans, and Seattle participated in an eighteen-month program to design and implement projects that engage lower income residents on various issues ranging from re-entry services to public health campaigns. Each city was awarded $100,000 over the life of the project. The cities received technical assistance and guidance from the Engagement Lab, an applied research lab based at Emerson College in Boston working on reimagining civic engagement in a digital culture, through monthly conference calls and quarterly convenings to hone their approaches. (See Appendix 2 for the overarching goals of the City Accelerator cohort on Public Engagement).
In addition to detailing the work of these five cities, this guide provides a background on public engagement and offers practical and detailed approaches for city officials nationwide to use when planning engagement processes. With this guide, you will: learn about the crucial concept of co-production as a frame for public engagement; Understand, through real world examples, the complexity of effective communication and relationship building; learn how to balance the key ingredients of a successful public engagement process, including creativity, inclusivity, and transparency; be taken through a step-by-step process, grounded in design-thinking methods, of planning a public engagement process.
There is no one-size-fits-all public engagement tool or technique (See Appendix 1 for a list of existing toolkits). Approaches to public engagement must continually adapt and evolve along with the communities they serve. As such, this guide walks you through best practices for how to manage the ever-changing landscape of public engagement.
The contributors set out the conceptual context for the intersection of civic and media; examine the pressure to innovate and the sustainability of innovation; explore play as a template for resistance; look at civic education; discuss media-enabled activism in communities; and consider methods and funding for civic media research. The case studies that round out each section range from a "debt resistance" movement to government service delivery ratings to the "It Gets Better" campaign aimed at combating suicide among lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer youth. The book offers a valuable interdisciplinary dialogue on the challenges and opportunities of the increasingly influential space of civic media.
* Describes net locality as an emerging form of location awareness central to all aspects of digital media, from mobile phones to online maps to location-based social networks and games
* Warns of the dangers that these technologies can present while also outlining the opportunities and the potential for pro-social developments
* Provides a theory of the web, not just mobile devices
between civic initiatives and institutional approaches often make it challenging for the former to become sustainable and increase their impact. We therefore explored how civic design could enhance the significance of local civic initiatives within institutional settings. The vivid conversation rendered three key orientations in civic design: 1) operating from within the community, 2) focusing on the interaction between civic initiatives and governmental and academic institutions, and 3) taking a transformational perspective on the interplay between civil society and its institutional
context in the information age. We identified prompting questions on four important topics, primarily related to the second orientation: listening to citizens, fostering collaborative relationships, ensuring continuity through funding, and scaling or spreading local civic initiatives. These questions contribute to the agenda for next steps on the role of civic design.