Reframing American democracy: the role of research in the interpretation of election design artifacts

In November 2000, a poorly designed 'butterfly' ballot in Palm Beach County, Florida, of the United States of America, changed election history. Mostly African American and older voters believed that they had mistakenly voted for Pat Buchanan instead of Al Gore because they misread or misinterpreted the instructions on the ballot that had candidate names on both pages and punch-holes down the middle. While some institutions and individuals wrote reports and dissected the problems with the butterfly ballot, few people or groups sought to redesign the ballot. In 2001, AIGA Chicago chapter members developed an interdisciplinary group of information designers, industrial designers, and social researchers to understand and redesign the voting experience. This group became Design for Democracy, an organization that seeks to increase civic participation by making the experience clearer, understandable, easier to accomplish, and more trustworthy. Through partnerships between professionals and undergraduate students at University of Illinois at Chicago, over three years, the organization conducted ethnographically-based research and redesigned the election experience in Cook County Chicago, the Vote-By-Mail experience for the State of Oregon, and a get-out-the-vote campaign for culturally and linguistically disenfranchised voters in Chicago. This paper explores the role of research, particularly ethnographic research, in the interpretation of the 'meaning' of redesigned election artefacts within the discourses of American democracy following the 2000 Presidential election. In particular, it focuses on the shifting discourses of American democracy as framed by the contexts of American professional design and usability organizations, international museums, and American federal government officials. I argue that the research enables people to reframe the negative view of American politics following the November 2000 election to one of politics of inclusion, complexity, and transformation. This reframing has significant impact on individuals' and groups' perceptions of their active roles as potential positive change agents in civic life.