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Situated collective intelligence
Processes rooted in a specific territorial context. No method applies the same way everywhere: place, timing and actors reshape the design.
Civic Design Tools is a practice that activates situated collective intelligence: processes tailored to each territory, attentive to the environmental and emotional nuances that allow a group to truly think and decide together.
Collective intelligence is a real capacity. But it can't be summoned: it has to be activated. And it only activates when someone has carefully designed the environment where it can emerge.
Designing a collective intelligence process is much more than organising meetings. It means caring for the environmental nuances —the place, the rhythm, the formats, the tools— and the emotional nuances —trust, listening, well-being, conviviality— that allow people to feel comfortable and safe enough to think together.
If you facilitate, support or build collective processes, this is written for you.
Civic Design is a professional methodology that stimulates collective intelligence within communities and territories: the joint capacity of a group to identify complex challenges and conceive solutions that no single person could produce alone.
The civic designer doesn't bring the answer, but the environment of exchange: how the actors relate, where, with which dynamics, at which frequency. Caring for conviviality, inclusion and the emotional well-being of participants isn't an extra — it's the very condition for collaboration to exist.
Processes rooted in a specific territorial context. No method applies the same way everywhere: place, timing and actors reshape the design.
Creating a real environment for collaboration: empathy, active listening, trust. Caring for the emotional well-being of participants isn't an extra — it's the process itself.
Making the process accessible and inviting for diverse people and communities; ensuring every participant feels comfortable and safe to express their ideas.
Articulating in-person and digital as a single coherent experience. The digital sphere amplifies physical encounter; the physical gives body to the digital.
"The civic designer offers their experience to activate an environment of exchange where local actors can generate, together, a process of collective intelligence."
— Domenico Di SienaAfter a successfully closed crowdfunding campaign, the book is now in its final production phase. It will soon be available for online purchase.
Thanks to the support of hundreds of backers, the crowdfunding campaign was successfully closed. Printing is guaranteed and the extended edition is in preparation.
A focused, three-hour battle manual for architects, public servants and social innovators who are tired of participation washing. Practical tools to design real processes — not endless workshops that lead nowhere.
Civic Design is a professional discipline that bridges the rigid structures of institutions and the organic energy of citizens. It focuses on designing processes, not just solutions, to activate the collective intelligence of a territory. This course gives you the method and the toolkit.
You'll work through the 4-phase Circular Process —Situate, Socialize, Co-design, Implement— and master the core toolkit: the Collective Intelligence Canvas, the Co-Design Canvas and the Civic Scope Matrix. By the end, you'll know how to map actors, build trust, facilitate real co-creation and design hybrid physical-digital ecosystems.
Proven method. The original Spanish version of this course is rated 4.7 ★ (Highest Rated) by more than 150 students. This English edition is an AI-assisted adaptation of the same content, methodologies and frameworks — all original work by Domenico Di Siena.
Civic designer. For over 20 years I've helped professionals, institutions, organisations and universities create processes of collective intelligence with citizens that generate positive impact on their territories.
I'm a civic designer, architect, urban planner, researcher, entrepreneur, activist —and not quite any of those definitions either. My work is built at the boundary between disciplines: what some call professional trespassing and which I prefer to call intellectual promiscuity in the service of change.
I've worked on projects in Spain, Italy, the United Kingdom, Latin America and the Middle East, and consulted for the United Nations, the Inter-American Development Bank, and city governments from Paris to Buenos Aires. My own method —the Civic Design Method— is the synthesis of patterns that have repeated themselves across many years of practice. Since 2015 I also teach it: more than a thousand people have taken my Civic Design courses across Europe and Latin America.
I design processes, yes — but I also train those who facilitate them. Practice and teaching feed each other: every course is a laboratory, every process is material for the next class.