Dana Chisnell, Center for Civic Design

Every great designed experience starts with the stories of individual humans. At the Center for Civic Design, Dana Chisnell and her team collected thousands of stories from U.S. voters over five years. The stories revealed two massive gaps in the process.

First, people who administer elections and voters have very different mental models of the process of voting. The second gap was between privileged voters and burdened voters. These gaps explained why it’s harder than it should be to vote in the U.S. and showed that policies meant to make things better had unintended consequences that actually make it worse.