Episode Transcript
Liz Gerber
Welcome or welcome back to the Technical Difficulties Podcast, where we celebrate the careers of amazing female designers and technologists. We had the pleasure of speaking with Arianne Miller, former managing director for the lab at the Office of Personnel Management during the summer of 2025. Since our conversation, Arianne's career had an amazing evolution, leading her to the role of managing director and co-founder of Civic Design Collaborative. We had the pleasure of reconnecting in the fall to discuss her new transition. With degrees in sociology and business, Arianne brings a deep cross-sector perspective to the table. Her journey spans federal agencies, nonprofits, and educational institutions, all driven by a passion for social entrepreneurship and community betterment. Get ready to be inspired by her thoughtful approach to leadership and learning. We can't wait to hear from you, Arianne. Thank you for joining us today.
Arianne Miller
Thank you for having me.
Liz Gerber
A warmup question for you. What is your favorite slash ideal way to start the morning?
Arianne Miller
Ooh, I have a covered porch and in DC it's a screened in porch, which is critical and a porch swing. And really nothing makes me happier than first thing in the morning, a couple hours before the rest of my household is awake, sitting on the porch with a fresh cup of coffee and just staring at the green. Not my phone, try not to stare at my phone. But yes, just being there, being in a quiet space and starting the day that way is really, really good.
Liz Gerber
Yeah, being present. Do you swing or do you like to stay still?
Arianne Miller
Yes, a little bit.
Liz Gerber
A little bit.
Arianne Miller
Just a little bit. Yeah, nothing crazy.
Liz Gerber
Nothing crazy, no active, active swinging. Okay, the next question and interpret it as you like. What is your favorite creativity tool?
Arianne Miller
Similarly, well, it's two very binary things. One is quiet, going for a walk without headphones, not listening to anything, not having an objective, just go for a walk, a nature bath or your neighborhood or whatever, and let your brain rest. I think that for me is a big one. But the reason I say there's two kind of binary ends to that is pairing that with a lot of time I'm having some pretty intense social interactions and gathering and bringing people together and around meals and just sort of general social time. So I really like to alternate between those sort of intense social interactions with lots of different people, all sort of pinging off of each other and then creating quiet space to let my brain process. That works well for me.
Liz Gerber
I love that. And it sounds like you need both of them.
Arianne Miller
I do need both of them, but I didn't recognize or embrace that I needed the quiet part until later in life. That took me a while to recognize that part of my need. And now, now I...
Liz Gerber
Yeah, do you remember when it happened or why it happened?
Arianne Miller
I don't exactly, I mean a lot of it had to do with I think having kids and having that just extra level of overwhelm, especially when they're younger and they need all the things all the time. And so I sort of, I realized I tipped past my threshold and that's when I really had to have a different strategy than just more all the time. Sometimes I definitely needed less.
Liz Gerber
Yeah. I love that. And I love there being a tipping point and actually not knowing there was a tipping point until you hit it. Great moment for learning. Thank you. Speaking of moments, I'd love to hear more about how you got started in the design field. Was there a like, I'm a designer moment or was it only in retrospect?
Arianne Miller
For me, it's always been in retrospect. And I say that because the way I got into a job where design was in my title was very much I was in a different federal agency. I was a decade into my career. I attended a class that the program I later led was running called Introduction to Human-Centered Design. And it was meant to…
Liz Gerber
Oh, you were a student in it.
Arianne Miller
Yes, I was a student in it.
Liz Gerber
I love that. And then you went on to run it. That's brilliant. Good.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, yeah. And I left and I was a student in it and I was also part of a program called the Presidential Management Fellows Program that required that, and federal agencies that required that during your first two years, you both get 80 plus hours of training and then in development and that you also go and do a short term assignment of four months or longer in another agency. And so I came to that class because I needed those training hours.
Liz Gerber
It was just hours though, at that point. Was it just hours? I mean, you were trying to fill hours. Or was there something about the topic?
Arianne Miller
Yeah, I was trying to hours. I mean, the topic intrigued me. had no idea what they were talking about, but I was like, yes, that sounds interesting, but I mostly need to fill hours. And it just resonated so significantly that I left the time, the third day of the class, was end of the class, and I, the director of the program at the time happened to be in the room, and I just walked over and said, you know, I need to do a rotation. I think I'd to do it here. Would you have me?
Liz Gerber
Awesome, right, third day, I love it, you knew.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, yeah, I just said, this is great. I want, this is, I want to do this. And of course I could offer my time to her for free. And, and at the time the program was very new and they were very happy to have extra support, although free support is not always, you know, it's not always free.
Liz Gerber
Okay. We'll put a pin on that and hear more about that later.
Arianne Miller
You know, but she said, yeah, yes, yes, yes. but no, she said yes. And, and I joined the program and that sort of temporary capacity and just kept saying yes to anything and everything they needed me to do and then had an opportunity to join as the position opened up just toward the end of that time and said yes. And the rest has sort of evolved on a weekly, monthly basis ever since, over the last 11 years or so. Yeah.
Liz Gerber
Amazing. What first got you into public service? I mean, right out of school, you were in public service and you've spent your career there. And, and you have this really interesting position of really being on the ground floor when design entered public service. That's so unique. I'd love to hear you reflect on what that was like.
Arianne Miller
So I think two things that got me into public service. One was just listening to and following my own curiosity, what I was reacting to in terms of things I found interesting. so professionally, the first job I had out of undergrad where I did, I studied at Northwestern. I studied both sociology and business institutions. And I was in that area of study because I in as a pre-med orthopedic surgeon in the making. Like that's what I was gonna do and pretty quickly recognized that very little about that experience was really working for me and reflected what I really wanted as I came to understand what that would look like in the coming years. And so instead I just started taking the classes that resonated and that brought me into sociology and later into this business institutions program. And that really helped me, that took me into my senior thesis where I was looking at a Chicago public high school and I was looking at the potential for discrepancy between the stated objectives of that high school, which was a military academy, and the actual implications for the students and the teachers that were part of that school.
Liz Gerber
Interesting
Arianne Miller
And so all of it was just really seeing how complex and challenging and multilayered the work of schools really was in that context. It got me curious and that led me into an opportunity to apply for and then get a job with the school district in the CEO's office, which was a new CEO, relatively new CEO at the time. So that's one version of quite literally how did I find my way into that first job. And I just found it so compelling and challenging and meaningful and hard that, that really kept me on that path, right? But the other part of my answer is that I was raised by my mom.
just her and I growing up, and she was a public servant for her 38 year career. She worked as a secretary and later a budget analyst for our city government. She was a woman working in the 70s, 80s, 90s in an environment that had certain pathways open to her, but it also afforded her as a high school graduate opportunities to do work that maybe she wouldn't be able to do in other places and in a place to be sort of rewarded for demonstrating competence. And so I saw her 38 year career with the city of Springfield, Illinois in various capacities. And I knew that was good, meaningful work that I was interested in when that started to be a path that seemed like a possibility for me.
Liz Gerber
That's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. And I'm reflecting that your thesis, senior's thesis was a research project in some ways, right?
Arianne Miller
Yes, yeah, exactly.
Liz Gerber
It was a design research project. And I wonder if you were then thinking about interventions as part of that, or was it more understanding the situation?
Arianne Miller
In that scenario, was much more understanding what's actually going on here. And what I now kind of understand about who are the named and unnamed stakeholders? What are the named and unnamed objectives? And to what extent is what's happening a reflection of the things in the foreground? What people say they're trying to accomplish? And to what extent is it a reflection of what's in the background that folks are less forthright about? So it was that, that beginning of that curiosity around, well, it's interesting because sometimes when a system doesn't appear to be accomplishing its stated objectives, what you have to do is understand there are actually other goals and objectives that it is accomplishing that they just don't want to talk about as much necessarily.
Liz Gerber
Correct. So this is a systems design challenge, right ?
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
Yeah, there's competing factors, different motivations. And I appreciate that. Just because something's not getting done doesn't mean people are incompetent. It means that they may be motivated by different objectives. And that's often the case.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, exactly. And I'll just briefly add that initial role led me into what was really the most analogous work I did in that first job that shows up over and over again in every job after it. It led me into an opportunity to work with community groups, to be a liaison between the district and community groups as new schools were being considered and established, and to understand all the machinations happening at the district level as those decisions are being
considered and made and how we were having conversations at the community level and trying to constantly be a diplomat between those two. That was a really, really formative privileged experience to be in that early in my career that I was able to take that on and do that, that system versus on the ground and the bridge between the two is a theme that comes up over and over again and it's a constant area of curiosity for me.
Liz Gerber
And one that you excel at.
Arianne Miller
Thanks. Yes.
Liz Gerber
I mean, you are exceptional, exceptional in this area. Your ability to move between, you called it a diplomat.
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
The word I came up with was like a maestro, like a conductor of, anyway, it's a compliment.
Arianne Miller
Yes, I'll take it.
Liz Gerber
I'm trying to pay you a compliment. Okay, so in this incredible career that you've had in public service, doing design, what is a surprising thing that you've learned so far in your journey?
Arianne Miller
This was my favorite prompt that you gave. I will just say that I had a whole bunch, but a couple I'm going to pick.
Liz Gerber
Share all of them. No, share them all. Cause you have such an interesting background and the way you come to business, sociology, design, public service is just, it's, you've worked in the consumer financial protection bureau. I mean, what haven't you done? It's so fascinating. You've worked in places that I think people on the outside must say like that has nothing to do with design.
Arianne Miller
Well, will, so yes, so there's two related lessons I'll highlight first. One is just the notion that problem framing is a skill. That was in that first class I mentioned when I was sitting in the introduction to human centered design and that topic came up. It had just never been put to me that way. I'd never really thought about, I thought of problems as things that people present to you that you then solve, right? You solve for it. And really being in a position to question the question and to dig into is that what are we actually solving for here? What are all the different ways we could describe this problem? And then we're making an active choice to pursue this one and not that one. Just that as a revelation around what work can be and what work really should be.
Liz Gerber
Do you have a concrete example that you can share with us of something kind of coming in in one way and you and your team saying, what if we looked at it from this other direction?
Arianne Miller
Yeah, well, one great example that we worked on and it became very prevalent in the pandemic. But prior to that, we worked with the Free and Reduced School Meals program. And a lot of that work was around the application that families fill out in order to access that program. And they were so thoughtfully but laser focused on this question, people are going to have to fill out this form, how do we make the form more efficient, more clear, more simple?
And that is a good objective and we did pursue that objective. But what became really much more clear throughout the course of the work was it was not how do we make the form simpler? How do we ensure that families who are eligible for this are receiving the benefit? How do we reduce the gap between who should be in the program and who is in the program? And that really led to more of the question of how do we eliminate the need for the form? How do we amplify actually this existing mechanism around universal school meals and not even needing there to be a form at all. The best form is no form. And so it was that, and it became very clear very early that they knew and understood, but were not really allowed to highlight that it actually would be spend more money processing, validating, investigating whether or not someone's eligible than we would spend if we just fed everyone.
Liz Gerber
Mm-hmm. Amazing.
Arianne Miller
And that lesson really, when you saw when the pandemic hit and schools had to make some pretty quick pivots, there was a significant pivot toward this idea of feed everyone, feed them inside of school, feed them outside of school. That is the mission here.
Liz Gerber
Absolutely.
Arianne Miller
And suddenly what wasn't possible before because of a framework around risk and the way that financial management was supposed to be done, cracked open and really a lot more became possible.
I'm not suggesting that our work sort of made that possible, but it helped, right? It helped sort of really prime the system for, well, maybe the best thing is to not need this form at all. And how do we pursue that goal?
Liz Gerber
Yeah, I love that. I love that the best form is no form. Yeah. Really beautiful. I think I'm just thinking about forms, the number of forms I fill out over and over and over again. I think to myself, there's gotta be a better way…
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
But I do know, I know it exists that way because of the different, the infrastructure, everybody needs their information. These systems aren't connecting. They're not sharing data. Like right to your point, there's all sorts of reasons.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and this also ties back to that earlier comment about the thing happening in the background that maybe we aren't talking about as much. And I think in this current environment, we do need to have very present. Sometimes those frictions are there for very good other reasons like privacy and like ensuring that information obtained for one reason is not in fact now suddenly being used for other reasons.
Liz Gerber
That's a great point.
Arianne Miller
That then so it's a tricky one. mean, because it is generally speaking, it does always feel silly when things can't just flow from one system to the other. But I think we are seeing and experiencing many examples where that happening too quickly with too few questions is in fact quite concerning.
Liz Gerber
Yeah, there's friction. There's a lot of interesting research being done on friction right now. And I think we often assume friction equals bad. And to your point, sometimes friction is good.
Arianne Miller
Sometimes we wish there were more of it, yes.
Liz Gerber
There's a little slowing down. Okay, I appreciate that. So I interrupted, you said you had two learning moments you wanted to share.
Arianne Miller
A second was one that I was doing for a while before I really named it and to me it relates to problem framing. It's that jobs are not a menu you choose from, at least not as you get farther into your career. You can craft jobs, you can pitch roles to people, you can take the beginning fuzzy outlines of something and if you are intentional and lean into it, know yourself and learn the organization and their needs, you can in fact, in every role I've been in, craft that role as a negotiation between the two party, between you and the organization and their needs. And I think it certainly makes sense when you're early in your career, you don't know yourself as well, you don't know, you have not as many concrete immediate things to offer necessarily that you're shopping off the menu in that very beginning. But even starting at that early point of thinking about where is there an opportunity for me to treat this as a negotiation, you know, to understand the needs behind why this position was created or exists and then to shape it over time. getting into that mindset early in your career and then applying it as you're pivoting or moving forward and thinking about what is it you want to accomplish and where are all the places, this is kind of a problem frame again, like where are other places I can do it? I know the observation that careers are rarely linear is a well-trod ground, but just even this idea that you don't even just get have to
leapfrog from thing to thing that other someone else created, that there are often these opportunities to in fact speak something into existence if you do the work to understand yourself and the context you're responding to and to put together possibilities.
Liz Gerber
I love this idea that, this question of where can I do the work that I want to do, I feel like I'm meant to do, it's the reason I'm here. And I'm curious, as opposed to thinking I must do the work at the organization where I currently am, where can I do the work that I want to do? And I agree, it feels like that confidence comes a little later, maybe…
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
Of really understanding what that work is. I'm curious if I can put you on the spot and ask you, what do you think your bigger mission is in terms of work. What do you think? You've done it in, I understand you've done it in public service, but what's the bigger question mission that Arianne Miller is on?
Arianne Miller
Yeah, yeah. I like that. It's really about unlocking and amplifying and aligning in a lot of cases what already exists, but is not quite able to reach its goal, right? And so to make that concrete, you know, I worked for a time in an organization called donorschoose.org and that was a way for public school teachers to more easily ask for specific things they needed in their classroom and for donors of all, all funding levels to more easily find those needs that aligned just exactly with what they were interested in and…
Liz Gerber
It's a brilliant service. Brilliant. Yeah.
Arianne Miller
To, right, as a brilliant service. I really, what I loved working then, I worked in strategic partnerships and in fundraising. I loved that all of these teachers were doing such difficult, such important work and they were doing it without the help they needed. And by this organization and through my role being able to say, well, there's people that really want to help and there's people that really need that help and there is just a disconnect with that last mile, or sometimes that first mile needs to be built. And so I have over and over again, that theme of building the first mile and building the last mile, finding those two things that when you combine suddenly become greater than the sum of their parts, I get really…
Liz Gerber
I love it.
Arianne Miller
Excited about that. And that has been the theme. I mean, a lot of it in my most recent work is about all of these civil servants who are, no one's perfect, of course they're not perfect, no one in the private sector is perfect either, but they're trying so hard to improve these systems, they often know exactly what needs to be improved, but what's missing is the mechanism for them to be asked, for them to articulate it, for that to be translated into an actionable set of steps, and I mean, not just the civil servants themselves, but the people receiving those services, the people we're serving.
What's missing is often the mechanism and the feedback loop and on an ongoing basis, not as a one-time thing. And I get really excited about how to help that knowledge that exists come to light, become more actionable and flow through to benefit the people that it should be benefiting, right? So it's, I don't necessarily like to start new things. I like to create something that enhances the value that already exists and is trying to break through into the world.
Liz Gerber
I love that. You articulated that perfectly. The first smile and the last smile, I love that. Okay, to bring us to the present, how are you thinking about, or what are you currently excited about as it pertains to thinking about that first smile or last smile? Like is there something you're reading…
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
Or a book you're, or a podcast you're listening to, or a recent experience that's kind of prompting you to think about that differently.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, I-I'm-
Liz Gerber
Another way of asking this question is, what are you nerding out on right now?
Arianne Miller
What am I nerding out on? I am really interested in the specific question of how you, it's related to how you help the helpers, but it is how you build community and structure experiences and not just structure, but align resources in a sustainable way behind… bringing people together who have those bits and bobs of knowledge from decades worth of work and into spaces where they are cared for, supported, where they get to be the person offering the knowledge and not always having to structure it and carry all the weight of that experience themselves. So, for example, and this is just a little thing I got to do recently, but I was attending an event called the Creative Bureaucracy Festival, and that was in Berlin.
Liz Gerber
I love the name, like, Creative Bureaucracy Festival. Like, just those three words you rarely see together. Well, maybe creative and festival you'd see together…
Arianne Miller
Right.
Liz Gerber
But bureaucracy stuck in the middle. I love that.
Arianne Miller
And it's, Iike 2000 plus people from around the world come together at that event for a day in Berlin for the last eight or nine years.
Liz Gerber
Amazing.
Arianne Miller
And even more importantly, so the event itself is like really well done, really exciting and invigorating and pretty overwhelming, frankly. But very, very thoughtful. But then what happens is around it, people think and they plan meals, other workshops, other events that are adjacent because here, the event, the festival itself has brought all of these people to this space, and in many cases, all of this distance to this place. And now they're there, and then they all get to sort of create the rest of that experience around it. And I decided to plan a dinner, and I decided to run a dinner, there's 13 of us there, pardon me, but the full spectrum of who was there were people I'd met 10, 11 years ago, very early in my career and it also included folks who run communities, right? There's a group called the International Design and Government Community run by Kara Kane and Martin Jordan and a whole host of others from different governments around the world on a volunteer basis. And a lot of the people that I got to reconnect with there were folks who are doing this in their free time and they're not they're free, they're carving out. They're not compensated for it. They're putting in immense energy because they know it's valuable. And I felt really nice to be able to just say, come, come, I've created this space for you. I'm not going to ask you. Am I going to facilitate you? Just be here, talk to each other. And I got to connect a bunch of nodes that hadn't actually, in many cases, talked to each other before. And I'm hopeful for what might eventually spring from that. But I also got to invite a few people I met the day before.
You know, and who I just struck a chord with. And it was such a small thing, but it was so nice to have these folks who have meant a lot to me in many cases over the years of my career and be able to do a little something for them as a little bit of a thank you. Over and over again, I've had a lot of recent conversations talking to folks who lead organizations that work in the civic design space. And every one of those, I try to ask the question, you know, what can I
do, can I help you? And over and over again, they say nobody ever asks me that because they're so useless.
Liz Gerber
Arianne, you asked the same of me. I still remember when you asked me, how can I help you? And I thought to myself, my gosh, what a beautiful gift. Thank you.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, absolutely. No, it's such a small gesture and it's really hard to do. I think, and I will share for your audience to say, I am in a professional moment of uncertainty, right? My program has been ended by the current administration without clear justification or rationale just because it was. And that does put me in a position to really, really initially reach out to people from a posture of needing help and seeking guidance. And I do, come to many people, and this is another professional lesson, asking for help is not a show of weakness at all, and you should be comfortable doing it. But even in those moments, it is a real comfort to ask that question and to be reminded that even in these moments of uncertainty, even when there's a lot of questions I don't have answers for, people will highlight things that you can do for them. And that is a source of agency and that is a source of confidence and it feels good. And it doesn't mean you have to follow through on every single one of those. You don't have to make your plate more full, but it is good for both parties, I think, to be in that moment. I don't know.
Liz Gerber
It feels good, it does feel good to be helped.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, and to help. And to help.
Liz Gerber
Yeah, my mother would always frame like if there was recent health issues with my dad and she said, as awful as it is that this is happening, it reminds me of how many people want to help me.
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
Like it's a confirmation of the incredible community and the support team that you've built piece by piece over the years, which is beautiful.
Arianne Miller
Yeah. Yeah.
Liz Gerber
Thank you for sharing that. A few more questions for you and then we'll wrap up. Okay, so Arianne, what is one thing you still want to learn or do in your career?
Arianne Miller
Part of it is a personal goal of learning how to better manage the cadence of sort of pushing and resting. And so I know, I imagine this question comes from more of a technical place, but my immediate feeling is acknowledging that for a long, long, long time, I worked and sort of strove in a way that was just all about constant movement forward and both getting older and having a wider variety of demands and life experiences reminds me of the importance of knowing how and when to come off the gas as a means of rest and recovery and also as a way of eventually pushing forward. And I think that is a personal lesson I am practicing and still very much learning, but it also really happens professionally too. I've really tried to lean in more with experimenting around use of timers, which I know is not anything new necessarily, but saying, I'm gonna really work hard for 30 minutes on this and I'm gonna walk away from it for an hour or two and go on one of those quiet walks or let my brain rest. So I think that, I know there's a lot of neuroscience here, know there's a lot, learning more about that and being more intentional about how to use that knowledge to create experiences for other people, as well as for myself, that allow progress that doesn't always have to feel quite so draining or hard all the time is very much on my mind.
Liz Gerber
You know, I loved your comment about neuro- learning about how the brain works. I get this sense that in the future, we're to look back at this time and we're going to liken it to the time when we used to put babies in cars with no car seats and smoke in the car.
Arianne Miller
Yes. What on earth?
Liz Gerber
Like we're going to say, what in the world are we doing? Like we were so that's not how the brain works. We are pushing ourselves too hard or not working at the right time. Yes. So I, I find that fascinating. I appreciate that. I also appreciate that you linked that back to your opening creativity tool, was both time alone and without technology and then time with people. And given that both are so important to you and the neuroscience is suggesting, yes, both are important, how do you actually navigate that in the of the fast pace, know, 30 minute meeting schedule that we have living by today? Yeah, thank you for that.
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
Yeah, thank you for that. Our last question is around unexpected advice you have for those entering your field. And I think you really get to decide what field you want to offer or think about.
Arianne Miller
Yes, let me think on that for a moment.
Liz Gerber
And it doesn't have to be unexpected advice. can be expected advice.
Arianne Miller
I'm looking at my notes about what I want to highlight
Liz Gerber
Okay, or there's another, another way I could ask this is if someone wanted to follow in your footsteps, what's one thing they should do now to prepare?
Arianne Miller
Mmm.
I mean, I think this shouldn't be unexpected, but I see so many people coming into work and frankly into life in general without this recognition. The best advice I can give is to be really curious about what already is and what has been when you're entering a new situation. It doesn't mean that that should anchor you all the time. It doesn't mean it should hold you back. But coming into situations without taking the time, at least some amount of time and having a stated intention of knowing who's there, how did it get to be that way? What has been tried in the past? Not because we can't try again, but if we understand what's been tried in the past and we can understand a bit about what the factors were that may or may not have allowed that to work and then question whether or not those factors are the same or different now, just that practice of phase zero.
I think in interactions of laying that baseline of being respectful and intentional and the way that we start off new relationships, whether it's in a new job, even in a new friendship and a new professional vein, a new organization, all of those, just having that moment of recognition that you know a lot and you're bringing a lot to the table and that is why you were there, but also
be equally, be as curious about other people as you would want them to be about you.
Liz Gerber
Mmm. that's beautiful.
Arianne Miller
I would love to offer another thing. This, Liz relates, this relates-
Liz Gerber
Keep going you are you are a fountain of knowledge. I will not stop you
Arianne Miller
This relates to a seminal story, I think I've heard you use that phrase in other podcasts. Sort of a thing I tell people about a lot and it's about you. One of the best pieces of advice I can give to people, especially young women is if somebody says something kind to you and complimentary to you, internalize it. Don't defer it, don't ignore it. Ask yourselves, ask them maybe what are examples of how that showed up or how do you know that about me? But don't push it away. Similarly, if someone says something critical or negative, you wanna listen to it. You wanna ask yourself what part of that might be real or not real. But too often we get those things backwards. We give all kinds of credence to what's unkind or what's dismissive or what's demeaning and we don't give enough space to the kindness. And the reason I say there's a story about you in this was that when you and I met, we met at a gathering in Chicago, and I wonder how much of this you remember, in 2017, and it was a-
Liz Gerber
2017, a windowless room.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, yeah. And I was, I was still pretty early in my career. The program I was leading at the time was still, it was not well known. It was still early in our development. And I had been invited into a room full of very knowledgeable academics and senior practitioners and industry folks in the design space. And we were in that conversation and that group was really having a conversation about the future of civic design and the role of designers in the civic space. And I was offering a thought.
I was offering from my purchase, one of the only people who actually worked inside of government at that time in that conversation.
Liz Gerber
Correct.
Arianne Miller
And, and we hadn't spoken yet, but you were sitting next to me and I was offering a thought and a person in the group, a senior, well-established, well-known guy, cut me off and said, why is she here? She doesn't have anything to offer. She doesn't have what we need. In front of a whole room full of people who I didn't know and you were next to me and again we had not spoken and you I remember you leaned over and you hugged me and you gasped and in horror at how just wrong that was and you didn't know me from you didn't you had no idea my background was and you-you said to me don't listen to him and that was the beginning of this friendship that was a really important moment in my professional self. I've been like, okay, I will not listen to him because I know this woman. I knew enough about you to know that I should listen to you. And ever since then-
Liz Gerber
Don't listen to him.
Arianne Miller
Don't listen.
Liz Gerber
That's advice to just give. Don't listen to him. Other people have said that to me. I mean, can credit my mentors for saying, don't listen to him.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, yeah. And that is why you've been somebody who I come back to regularly as a touchstone. Because you are formidable as well as kind. And I think being that for other people is looking for the opportunities to be that for other people is both a lesson of like listen to those folks, but also try to be that person when you have the opportunity.
Liz Gerber
Well, you are that person. You are formidable and kind. And I look to you as a touchstone. I admire, deeply admire everything you've done and will continue to do. It has been such a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your stories with us, Anne. I wish you the best of luck as you navigate this uncertain time. And I'm 120 % confident that you will come out the other side blowing our minds with what you do.
Arianne Miller
Thank you, Liz.
Liz Gerber
Thank you for your service.
Liz Gerber
Okay, so it's been a couple months and we're checking back in. You were prototyping a few different ideas. Tell us what you've been up to.
Arianne Miller
Absolutely. Well, since we last spoke, I did the thing that I swore to myself I wasn't going to do at the beginning of this whole recent chapter. And I've decided to launch a new initiative, an organization called Civic Design Collaborative. It's a new team that I'm creating with old team members. So a group of folks that I have previously worked with at the lab at OPM couldn't quite quit each other and decided that having looked around, having talked to a lot of different people, having sought to understood what was happening at the state and local level in particular in the civic design space currently sort of updated our understanding. Conclusion was there is still a lot left for us to offer that is complimentary, that is still very much needed. There is a vibrant community of folks doing really good and interesting work and we saw an opportunity to build on that and contribute to it. And so now there's a group of five of us, my former colleagues, Sean Baker, Patty Byrne, Sarah Romanoski and Aideen Foick, who are working with me to figure out what it means to be the Civic Design Collaborative.
Liz Gerber
Okay, three questions off of that. What does it mean, congratulations first of all, what does it mean you couldn't quit each other? That's question number one, I love that question. Second one, why did you promise that you would never do this? That's how you introduce yourself. And the third question is what does it mean to be, define what it means to be I think a civic designer.
Arianne Miller
I will confess in the beginning of the process, shortly after our team had been abolished and had been eliminated and sitting in that feeling of all of these things being destroyed, all of this good work, it felt like going away and being in sort of that unhappy space, all I could really see in the invitation to get the band back together or start again, which was what a lot of folks were encouraging me to do, all I could see in that were the risks. And all I could see was how hard that would be, which I knew from building the program, not entirely from scratch, because others get credit for founding the program and getting it off the ground before me. But from my 11 years of running it, I knew how daunting it was to start over again. And I think I was in a headspace. It was hard to be future focused. I also frankly, and this relates to that opportunity to work again with folks who I really respect and appreciate and whose skills are so complimentary to mine. One of the hardest parts about the lab at OPM ending and that phase of my career closing was the loss of the team. You know, a group of people who are so good at what they did and who are so kind to each other and who are so appreciated and feeling on some level like I got everybody into this. It's not exactly my fault, but I'm not gonna get everybody into it again just to have something ripped away, you know? And so I think I was in that head space of that sounds really, really hard. I do not wanna be in this position again and I just, can't think about that. But after I slept a lot, cried a lot, talked to a lot of folks and got a lot of encouragement to revisit that decision. And then I think also really importantly in one of those conversations, a few of them, met an organization, met some leaders in an organization called socialfinance.org that was not only curious about the work we had been doing, they themselves have been working in the public sector, supporting state and local government for over 14 years. But they were actually also willing to put some funding and some support in infrastructure behind helping us reinitiate some version of the program and explore what it would look like, not just to bring that work back online, but also to look at the work they've been doing around really important and interesting funding models and results-based funding models, pay-it-forward funds, a lot of ways of bringing funding to bear on large social problems.
They were interested in how human centered design could improve the work they were already doing. They're interested in how the services we had provided at the federal level could actually be translated to state and local and to some of their partners and to new partners. And so a conversation opened up around all of the ways that that could be pursued. And that's what sort of sparked this possibility of, okay, it feels less daunting to just completely start from scratch. And it felt really good to think about that in partnership with a group that was sort of willing to not just encourage but also support in a lot of other ways. And so that got us started. And at this point, Social Finance is the first customer and the first formal partner for Civic Design Collaborative as we continue to build out a pipeline of new possibilities and additional work. Yeah.
Liz Gerber
That's great. So support, encouragement, future orientation, team members, all those things coming together made a big difference.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And I think also the recognition that this question they were asking themselves, like what is the opportunity for human centered design in our work? What are we doing well, but could be doing better if we had more rigor and new ways of bringing a variety of voices and stakeholders into the conversation in different ways. Also the ability to create new kinds of artifacts and storytelling devices that help people see services and journeys in different ways.
That was fundamentally the question we were helping every one of our federal partners work through. And so once I zoomed back and saw, that's actually not any different than what we've been doing, that became a frame in which the invitation felt much more clear and viable.
Liz Gerber
So I think you've also answered questions one and three, which is what does it mean to able to quit a team? So sounds like you're pretty committed and loved your team because they looked out for each other and they were smart, they complimented you and they were caring. And then civic designer seems to be someone who uses human-centered methods to design civic services.
Arianne Miller
Yeah, think a civic designer, yeah, absolutely. It takes a lot of different forms. There are a lot of folks who bring very specific and very important technical skills and user research and trauma-informed practices and visual design and a whole host of, and of course, then there's a whole digital world of how all of that comes together. So, civic designer can be a lot of different things. It's fundamentally the folks who are creating, sustaining, testing, implementing services, policies, et cetera. So it's sometimes folks who have formal training and other times folks who were learning on the job, very much like in the story I shared in the previous recording, how I stepped into the work. So I think it's a pretty inclusive umbrella and really a surprisingly vibrant ecosystem, given how little you might hear about it, because it's a lot of folks doing the work and not necessarily talking about it all the time.
Liz Gerber
Yeah, can we talk about that for a moment? Because I feel you're right. You don't see like civic designer on job boards or you don't see like master's degree in civic design. So why, what is that about? Why do you think that is?
Arianne Miller
There's a technical question where a lot of hiring in government at any level of government is stuck in practices and nomenclature and wording that doesn't translate to the present very well. So, but you are actually increasingly seeing these kinds of positions, design strategists, customer experience specialists, visual designers, user experience designer. You see them, but part of the issue I think is that system is so fragmented. That's also what made it really daunting to think about a shift to focusing on state and local with something like 15,000 different municipalities if you really broke it all the way down, right? And so that's the really, really long tail as well as obviously 50 state level governments, counties in between all of that. So it's a place where even when there's collectively a lot of folks working in that space, in any one place there's only a handful and
we tend to be able to understand those little pockets more clearly. And so it might feel like, there's not a lot here. But when you zoom back, you realize it's a quite prolific group of folks. And increasingly embedded inside the system, not just working as contractors or partners on the outside, but increasingly embedded.
Liz Gerber
Well, so that's my question is, do you need to work inside the system? Can you work outside? Like you have such an interesting vantage point now in this space for so long. What's your take on this?
Arianne Miller
The best world is both, right?
Liz Gerber
Being involved at the same time?
Arianne Miller
Being, well, I mean, having really competent, dedicated, skilled practitioners who are both inside the system and partners on the outside of the system who are working with them. There are practical constraints around hiring and a fundamental system bias for buying and outsourcing that's going to mean that most the volume of the capacity needed to do the work is going to exist outside of system. You need what you need on the inside of the folks who understand, who know what good looks like, who can set the strategy, who can do that core inherently governmental work and who know how to buy it well, right? Who know how to find the folks. So you really do need both. It's not either or. And I think it took me a little while to let go of everything.
I knew from my decade plus of working on the inside about how important it was and how much I could only, I felt like I could only do because I was on the inside to embracing and acknowledging. I've always known and respected and appreciated so many folks who were working in for-profit and nonprofit structures, you know, as partners all over the country and internationally and try to see myself in that other space and think about how to translate what I've been doing into a new area and so find value in it.
Liz Gerber
Okay, I have another question that maybe is gonna seem like coming out of left field, but since we last talked, another huge change that's been happening in my industry, and I'm curious how you might see it being yours, is AI is just coming into the classroom. And the question is, what kind of careers are we preparing our students for? And so my question to turn on you is, in the field that you're in, and you're going to be hiring people as you continue to run these organizations. And as AI takes over more more, generative AI specifically, takes over more and more creative tasks, what are you seeing out there? What skills do you think the next generation graduating from college are going to need to be a civic designer?
Arianne Miller
So I will do a thing that most folks won't do when they talk about AI in this moment, which is acknowledge fully that it is an area I am learning about. I do not know everything I should know about it. It's a huge growth curve decline. That much has become quite evident, quite evident. But no, think what I see is still a very fundamental skill set in design, as well as what students will need in a world where AI has taken over everything, is the ability to frame a problem really thoughtfully, the ability to discern to reality-check things, to test and question, okay. Because in some ways it's not so different what you see happening with AI, you know, as I've experienced it. It's not so different from when you're doing interviews with users and they're telling you, the problem is this and here's what's, and they're speaking with so much authority about, you know, from their experience. But the skill of a designer and a design team is to be able to take all of this information, which is set in very authority, and then actually look between the lines and, test in ways that help you see what's the truth here? Like what's actually going on? So there's actually this interesting echo of what we already have to do in the cacophony of data that we collect in a variety of unstructured formats to make sense of things that is also a skill set related to a world where, you know, the volume can be incremented exponentially and finding the signal and the noise becomes harder and harder. And also we get back to some of the earlier conversation we had around like, what are the stated and unstated objectives and biases in a situation and how are we teasing them out and how are we naming them and how are we mitigating for them? So I think that, there's a lot of that and you're still gonna have to know how to write because you're still going to have to be able to discern good, compelling writing, right? If you don't know what good looks like, even if you're using support to generate, you won't know what's going to actually be compelling or interesting or clear to others. And that remains super important even when you can generate an infinite amount of content.
Liz Gerber
I was reflecting on the impact that the internet had, like the technological impact that the internet had on the access to information and the overwhelming feeling and the excitement and feeling of overwhelm that it had on me and that in some ways you and I have the benefit of having seen many new technologies in our time come in.
Arianne Miller
Right.
Liz Gerber
Kind of the way in which it felt like it was disrupting our world and how we navigated and how we were overwhelmed by the amount of information and navigated what is truth, what is not, where is it coming from? And that to be sure this is a big wave, but this is in some ways the best skill that we can learn is one of agility and resilience.
Arianne Miller
Yeah.
Liz Gerber
And the job navigation that you just demonstrated in the last couple of months is actually just a-
I think that's the skill that we all need to learn, whether it's facing technology or facing a job change. It's the ability to kind of pivot and figure out what's next.
Arianne Miller
Well, and I also offer the, I don't know how to say this, like the importance of knowing how to be fundamentally human. How to still connect meaningfully with other people. This question of AI and hiring, you know, and what people are experiencing these two waves crashing together of this huge flux, not just from government, also from private sector, ton of disruptions coming from what's happening at the federal level, all across the private sector, also in other levels. So you have this huge wave of folks entering the job market. And at the same time, you have AI storming into every level of the hiring process. So you have massive, and those two waves are like adding to each other, right? Because you have just a crushing amount of interest in every job that is offered being met with untested, not well vetted, but desperately needed tools to filter through that noise. And it is creating a situation, you know, people are just flailing. Really smart, really capable people with lots of, cannot get past the first gatekeeper, because it's not, there's nothing human about the first three levels of the process. so what I've seen and what I've really, I mean, one of the things I've seen my, my team and not just my team, like just hundreds of other people. I am on LinkedIn way more than it is healthy to be. But what I'm seeing on there constantly are people respond instead of choosing to respond with volume and aggression and just like rapid motion, they are choosing high touch, extremely human ways of hiring, of helping each other navigate, of trying to engage.
with this situation. And I mean, this is not to say, we don't need tools that can scale and respond to volume, but just always reminding ourselves, like, we need to know how to still, as a hiring manager, just because you can screen through 2,000 applicants in 20 seconds, and just because you can, should you? Is that what you should do? Is that how you should interact with people who just spent, just because you can ask people to do automated assessments, at four stages of it and you don't have to grade them because some bots gonna do it? Should you be asking people to do that? Like we need to remain attuned to our humanity. I don't know, mean, that's obviously some of the best versions of education offer us. Hopefully that's gonna continue to be a part of the conversation along with what does AI brings. Like, well, how do we remain human in the face of all of that?
Liz Gerber
Yeah, that's the question I've been asking. Increasingly, I know I'm trained as a designer and an engineer, but increasingly I feel like I'm asking questions of philosophy, which is, think, how do we remain human? And then the other question is, is there a world in which AI can help us be even more human? I've always been fascinated by this idea that, is there way to reconfigure what looks like what's going to take us down, actually save us or help us? And there's this idea that the Titanic ran into a big ice. And the story I once heard was could people have actually, the iceberg took down the Titanic, but could people have actually gotten off the Titanic and used the iceberg as a-
Arianne Miller
Oh, interesting.
Liz Gerber
And I don't know if that's true, but I've always been kind of captivated by that idea. Like, is there something that we could use it? Is there some way it could actually help us become even better?
Arianne Miller
Well, and let me, the first time that came into my head as you were saying that is, well, what actually brought the Titanic down was a failure of imagination. It was a failure, was barely over a thousand decisions that went into it, to what happened to the moment, once it hit the iceberg, they were screwed, right? But I mean, there were a lot of things that were very human choices about what to consider as a risk or not about who, how many boats to have and for whom.
You know, like there were a lot of choices. The iceberg is the thing that's, you know, easiest to blame. And it played its part. You know, I mean, there's, it feels, as we're talking about this, an interesting analogy, you know, the technology, the technology has its risks inherent, but it's how we choose to anticipate the risks.
Liz Gerber
I like that. I like you- that's very interesting. It's like all the things that led you to it. Yeah, it was, that was not necessarily the, yeah, all the choices. I appreciate that. So, so let's look forward for a moment. You've got your couple months in. What kind of less, what are you looking forward to in the next six months? And the other question is what kind of lessons are you taking from this pivot, should you happen to come into this kind of situation again? I hope not. But what do you think you'll be able to take lessons and remember back to this?
Arianne Miller
Yeah, absolutely. mean, a lot of it has, what took me a while was to, it took me a while to trust myself. And I, as much as I tried not to, I certainly internalized, I always try to be accountable to myself and others. I always try to understand what could have been better in any situation. And I spent a while in this one, you know, reflecting, cause I'm not pretending I was perfect and I made every decision and it took me a while to just sort of circle around it from every possible angle and continue arrive at the point of like, no, it's not that I, my judgment is fundamentally flawed or I'm not capable of, you know, doing the, I ran into an iceberg. Yeah. Once the iceberg hit, we were screwed. So like that wasn't, but it took me a while to regain the clarity that that is not, and I will also say it was an intentional message being delivered, right? That that was the result of incompetence and lack of value for the folks who, not just us, know, hundreds of thousands of people who are experiencing this. And I had to make a choice not to internalize that message. And I would do that sooner in the future. I certainly was immediately telling other people that's not, don't do that. Don't listen to them. But it took a minute to observe that for myself. And so what I am looking forward to every now and then we have these moments where we'll decide, we need to update content on the website. I'm like, great, it. Oh, we could use, it'd be nice if we had this other tool. Oh, like, oh, is that $87? Yes, absolutely. Buy it. Those were not choices we could just make unilaterally on the ends. know, there are all of these little things that were, in some cases, had important and useful frictions and, you know, to evaluate the risk. Other times were just completely out-sized and absurd relative to like the choice. And so what I'm enjoying is the ability to choose and make decisions and experiment more freely and try things that we couldn't try and learn and pivot and not have the weight of- will this choice make everyone question whether or not there's any value to design? I was like, no, I don't carry the weight of that now. And that I don't mind. For a little while. It was a privilege to answer, to be part of a lot of different people who were answering that question. It was a privilege and it was worth the effort, but I don't mind for a minute. Not necessary. Not happy to- Yeah, and also I'm looking forward to the folks who are still in that, know who are still living in that world at any level of government I look forward to pouring my energy back into helping them. Yeah, helping them unlock that potential helping them Get over that hurdle. They've they've seen and been kind of client trying to climb over but couldn't I mean I look forward to the same things I looked forward to every day in my job before.
Liz Gerber
I so respect that. Thank you. Thank you so much. Any final words of wisdom or advice that you have?
Arianne Miller
I thank you for this forum and for holding up a mirror, not just for myself, for others to have a pause and a time to reflect, because this might sound narcissistic. I've listened to the rough cut a bunch of times, and each time heard something that I forgot I said or was not conscious that I was thinking. And it's been incredibly helpful to-to surface that, so thanks for the second bite at the apple. Come back and we'll see what else I learn about what I'm thinking when I get to listen back to it.
Liz Gerber
Thank you from all of us, truly a gift. Thank you so much. Thanks for taking your time. Really appreciate it.
Arianne Miller
All right, thank you, Liz. Take care.
Liz Gerber
And thank you to our listeners for listening to the Technical Difficulties Podcast, produced by the Center for Human-Computer Interaction and Design and the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University. That was Arianne Miller, and you can find out more about her in the show notes. You can learn more about the show by going to technicaldifficultiespodcast.com. Drop us a note at technicaldifficultiesteam@gmail.com or leave us a review on your favorite podcast app.