MY ROLE
Lead Designer & Project Lead
TIMEFRAME
January 2023 — April 2024
TEAM
IMPACT
$26,000 Pledged to Fund Development
Assemble emerged organically from hundreds of conversations during my work at Democracy Creative — with civic leaders who could convene citizens’ assemblies, advocacy organizations pushing for them, and practitioners with the expertise to plan and organize them.
I began to notice a pattern: across all these roles, we kept hearing similar things:
It seems like a pretty complicated process and I'm not sure it's worth it for us…
🧑💼
I love the idea, but how much would this cost? What would it look like in our city?
👩💼
We spend hundreds of hours manually crunching the numbers for every proposal…
👩💻
I wish there was a way to quickly show my representatives that this is a legitimate, practical thing, not a looney idea…
👨🦰
As a designer, I recognized a persistent, underlying problem — one that I thought a well-designed tool could solve.
$67,100 USD
585 Hours
Advocates and practitioners pushing for citizens’ assemblies wanted more of them to be implemented, but were held back by the time, cost, and effort of pitching each one from scratch.
At the same time, civic leaders faced urgent pain points that assemblies could alleviate — but didn’t have the time or tools to understand how. And advocacy groups were stretched too thin to help them all.
The two-sided problem could be distilled into this definition:
Every citizens’ assembly project required 100s of staff hours and tens of thousands of dollars to secure — making scale nearly impossible.
Without hands-on guidance, community leaders lacked an easy, clear way to understand how a citizens’ assembly could benefit them, limiting adoption.
In short, without an accessible, engaging tool to streamline planning and adoption, citizens’ assemblies remained too costly for advocates and too opaque for civic leaders. As a result, they couldn't scale — and their full potential to strengthen democracy would go unrealized.
This insight led to an idea:
What if we could develop a simple, intuitive tool empowering anyone — from civic leaders to community organizers to practitioners — to easily scope and plan a citizens' assembly for their community: significantly reducing time and costs?
For practitioners, it could ease the burden of drafting complex, bespoke proposals. For civic leaders and organizers, it could, at scale, shift citizens’ assemblies from an abstract, unfamiliar concept into a tangible, practical solution.
With our small and unfunded (but deeply committed) team at Democracy Creative, we began the journey from zero to one — imagining what this tool could become.
Our initial challenge quickly became clear:
How could we visually convey the core elements of a citizens’ assembly in the simplest, most intuitive way?
We knew this visual framework would be central to the product, so we devoted significant effort to distilling the assembly into its essential components.
After many rounds of refinement and feedback — what emerged was a clear, four-part circle representing the foundational pillars of a successful citizens’ assembly: Process, Facilitation, Participants, and Learning.
Each section was illustrated with approachable visuals that made the model easy to understand and act upon.
I'm proud that this representation was often described by innovators in our field as the clearest and most elegant representation of a citizens' assembly they'd seen.
Our goal was to create a seamless experience that empowered users by removing friction, and helping them understand and envision an assembly in their community as quickly as possible.
When designing a citizens' assembly, the first step is selecting a location. This single input is rich with context, which allows us to suggest relevant topics and estimate the project's scope and budget.
AI analyzes local news and data from the chosen location to suggest timely, relevant topics. This approach replaces a blank page with actionable ideas, sparking the user's imagination and dramatically lowering the barrier to getting started.
The result is a much more streamlined experience for the user.
After completing a brief setup wizard — already populated with recommended settings inferred from their location — users arrive at the main assembly design screen, the central hub of Assemble. From here, users can click any section to customize its parameters.
We designed these settings not only to give users control, but also to help them understand the constraints and implications of each decision.
For those who want to learn more, a "Learn" link in each panel reveals a mini-lesson explaining why that parameter matters and how to think about its implications for their assembly.
We designed the platform to grow organically, powered by community action. After a user designs a citizens' assembly proposal, they are encouraged to share it with friends and neighbors to gather support.
This sharing mechanism serves two crucial functions:
First, it fuels the platform's growth by introducing new people to the power of citizens' assemblies.
Second, it aggregates public support into a powerful signal for civic leaders. A proposal backed by hundreds of residents provides a clear mandate, demonstrating which issues truly matter to the community and urging officials to take action.
As a nonprofit project, Assemble’s long-term viability depended on more than our mission — it required financial sustainability. We knew we couldn't rely on grants forever, so we developed a business model that honors our public-interest goals while creating a path to self-sufficiency.
Our core planning tool was designed to always be free and open to ensure accessibility for all. Then, after a user designs their ideal assembly, Assemble serves as a lead generator for a vetted implementation partner in their area. These partners pay an annual fee for access to these qualified introductions.
This creates a virtuous cycle: the free tool generates meaningful projects for our partners, their fees fund the platform's continued development, and our collective work strengthens democracy.
We were designing Assemble as a socially-minded product, not just an academic tool. We gave great thought into how to communicate the value proposition to our potential users.
Our audience of civic leaders — officials, organizers, and advocates — needed a practical tool for solving urgent public challenges, not an academic exercise.
The landing page headline was therefore a critical piece of messaging. It had to instantly convey our value proposition to anyone, especially since most visitors wouldn't know what a citizens' assembly is. The message needed to resonate without requiring any prior knowledge.
The iteration that stuck was "Solve hard public problems with better democracy."
This framed our core value proposition and positioned Assemble as a powerful, practical tool for achieving real-world results.
Building Cohesive Brand Iconography
Designing the Logo
Our vision for Assemble was to become the go-to platform for democracy innovation tools. We understood that strong visual branding conveying trust, legitimacy, and effectiveness would be essential to that.
As we developed the visual system for the platform, I realized that the circular diagram we had designed to represent the structure of a citizens’ assembly could serve a deeper purpose. It wasn’t just an illustration — it could be our icon.
The final logo retained the circular unity of the original diagram, evoking collaboration, convergence, and shared purpose.
Ultimately, we were able to secure $26,000 in pledges from practitioner organizations and advocates who saw the potential of Assemble and wanted to see it built — a strong signal of the potential and promise of Assemble. However, our funding strategy also depended on grants from foundations, which, in a difficult funding climate, proved intractable for our team.
We delivered a comprehensive prototype and strategic framework — one that laid out a serious potential path for how we might scale citizens' assemblies to a level that could genuinely change the shape of democratic government globally.
And I'm proud that the ideas we proposed influenced the conversation this space and has since inspired and contributed to the evolution of numerous ideas in the field.
Looking back, our nonprofit grant-funded strategy incentivized creating a polished prototype to showcase long-term potential that could attract a large grant. In other words, it incentivized designing, but not shipping.
In hindsight, I would have simultaneously pursued partnerships with local developers or groups like Code for America to build a simpler MVP that we could have begun testing and iterating immediately. At the same time, I would have looked for other ways to sustain myself, since my income to continue the work depended on grants and donations.
After this project, I also came to the conclusion that a socially-driven, for-profit model is probably more likely to be successful in terms of scale and impact than a nonprofit. This shift in thinking has informed my work since — particularly DemocracyOS.