“Design for Democracy” students interrogate relationships of power, vulnerability, and trust with Ethics Lab’s stakeholder mapping exercise

This spring, Ethics Lab conducted a stakeholder mapping exercise (what the Lab calls “mapping the moral landscape”) for students enrolled in the School of Foreign Service’s Design for Democracy course. Taught by Adjunct Professor Kyla Fullenwider, Senior Advisor for the Surgeon General of the United States and a former fellow at Georgetown's Beeck Center for Social Impact & Innovation, the course introduces students to processes for creating change at scale and cultivates problem solving skills for strengthening democracy and civic life. 

“Many of our most admired public institutions are undergoing a stress test in the 21st century, and they were built long before. A lot of the disruptions that we've seen happen in the last decade or two—including the acceleration of climate change, technology, and globalization—have an impact on our democratic institutions. Technology particularly has been a strong theme throughout the course. The idea of this course is to use human centered design and community centered design methodologies to address some of the most daunting challenges facing our democracy and democratic institutions,” said Fullenwider. 

While the course includes engaging with theory, many aspects of the course are hands-on with students tackling problems affecting democratic institutions as part of their group projects. Some of the issues addressed by students include developing tools for media literacy and potential methods to streamline information from the federal government through social media. Ethics Lab collaborated with Fullenwider on a stakeholder mapping exercise to help students analyze the ecosystem of actors surrounding each problem and the many levels of impact felt by institutions, communities, and individuals.

“We quickly identified this stakeholder mapping as a really natural way to work together, because it's something that the Ethics Lab already has a lot of experience in doing and I wanted students to tackle ethical questions when coming up with solutions affecting democratic institutions head-on. In previous renditions of the course, I usually conducted a high-level stakeholder mapping exercise later in the course. Through this collaboration I wanted to deepen the work of stakeholder mapping and for students to ask these ethical questions ahead of diving into their problem solving phase. Rolling out the stakeholder mapping exercise earlier allowed the students to start thinking about who's impacted by these issues and who holds power, and let that exploration lend itself to the research for their group projects,” Fullenwider added.