Context
This project tackles the challenge of engaging culturally and socially diverse residents in shaping a government that truly serves them. While Swiss citizens have voting rights, participation remains low.
Meanwhile, non-Swiss residents, who make up a significant part of the population, have no voting rights and are often excluded from civic life.
About
The "Future Local Government" project, addresses the challenge of engaging culturally and socially diverse residents in the development of a government that serves them effectively in the future.
For a more in-detail overview of this project, click below to be redirected to a google folder:
Role
Service Designer
Client
Emmen Municipality
Team
03 Service Designers
06 Designers
01 Supervisor
Timeline
Main research challenge was executed in 2 weeks in May. However, the project was still active until the end of 2022
The following personal skills were implemented during this project:
Hi-Lo Fi Prototyping
Ethnographic reserach
UX/UI Design
Data Analysis
Graphic Design
Cross-cultural competence
02
Cultivating Civic Participation
Fostering Inclusive Governance with Emmen Municipality
Goal
The goal of this project is to create a more inclusive and participatory local government—one that fosters trust, engagement, and a sense of belonging among all residents of Emmen, regardless of their voting eligibility.
01
Lower voter turnout
among Swiss citizens, leading to disengagement from local governance.
02
Lack of participation from non-Swiss residents
making it difficult to include their voices in municipal decisions.
03
A need for innovative, inclusive strategies
to make governance more relatable, interactive, and accessible.
Client's Problems
Design Process
Business Research
To gain a deeper understanding of the challenges from a governmental standpoint, we met with local politician Ramona from Emmen and other municipal team members.
✔ Key barriers to civic participation from a policy and administration perspective.
✔ The municipality’s past efforts to engage residents and their effectiveness.
✔ The need for a more dynamic, people-centered approach to participation.
This dialogue allowed us to align our design strategy with the municipality’s goals, ensuring that our solutions would be feasible and impactful within existing governance structures.
Field Qualitative Research
To bridge the gap between government initiatives and public engagement, we conducted extensive field research, including:
We conducted in-depth interviews and informal conversations with over 60 Emmen residents, including both Swiss citizens and non-Swiss residents. To ensure accessibility and inclusivity, discussions were held in German, English, and other commonly spoken languages among migrant communities. These conversations revealed that many citizens, especially non-Swiss residents, felt unheard and uninformed about how local governance decisions affected them.
We facilitated interactive workshops where some citizens and municipality team members shared their experiences and opinions on civic engagement and contributed with potential solution ideas.
Also, within the designer team we also did several rounds of brainstorming.
Analyzing global best practices in civic engagement and available data that could contribute with a more elaborated outcome proposal.
Through this multi-layered research approach, we uncovered a key insight:
📌 Civic disengagement was not just about voting—it stemmed from a deeper sense of disconnection from the system.
Found challenges for the Citizens
Many residents showed little interest in political engagement.
Many residents showed little interest in political engagement.
Many residents showed little interest in political engagement.
These challenges highlighted a gap between governance and the people it serves, reinforcing the need for design interventions that foster inclusivity, awareness, and engagement.
We synthesized the main issues
Our research revealed that civic disengagement wasn’t just about voting—it was about feeling unheard, unseen, and disconnected from the system. How could we turn these into opportunities?
Outcome
We developed three key interventions aimed at fostering engagement, belonging, and accessibility:
1.Emma, The Mascot for Community Participation
Emma was designed as an interactive and emotional engagement tool, making civic participation more visible and approachable.
As a modular puzzle piece, Emma adapted across physical and digital environments, reinforcing a sense of belonging and recognition for residents. Strategically placed in public spaces and online, Emma encouraged playful interactions that strengthened trust and participation between citizens and the municipality.
2. Physical Interaction Touchpoints
To embed participation within the public realm, we designed tangible interaction points that seamlessly integrated with everyday urban life. These included:
A frictionless feedback mechanism, enabling residents to leave voice messages with concerns or ideas for the municipality. This intervention lowered the barrier for participation by making civic engagement a spontaneous and low-effort action.
By gamifying the voting process in local parks, we introduced an experiential learning model that familiarized young citizens with democratic participation from an early age.
This multi-generational engagement strategy reinforced long-term civic involvement by embedding it into early development experiences.
These interventions transformed civic participation into a tangible, habitual, and cross-generational experience, increasing inclusivity beyond traditional political spaces.
3. Digital Platform with Sentiment Analysis
To address the challenge of silent disengagement, we developed a data-driven digital platform with Natural Language Processing (NLP) capabilities to analyze sentiment trends in Emmen’s community.
By leveraging AI-powered sentiment classification, the platform aggregated public discourse from social media channels and municipal platforms, classifying resident emotions as positive, negative, or neutral. This provided real-time qualitative insights into community concerns.
The platform enabled the municipality to shift from reactive to proactive governance, identifying emerging topics and addressing pain points before they escalated.
This approach aligned with evidence-based decision-making principles, allowing for responsive and citizen-informed policy improvements.
This hybrid service ecosystem (combining physical interventions, gamification strategies, and digital intelligence) positions the municipality of Emmen as an adaptive and citizen-centric government—bridging the gap between governance structures and public engagement.
Reflection
This project highlighted the role of designers as facilitators, bridging people and actions to drive meaningful change.
I’m deeply grateful to those who trusted us with their experiences—our work was shaped by their voices, and I hope we advocated for them effectively.
As a foreigner in Switzerland, I related to many of these stories, which made representing diverse perspectives feel both necessary and natural.
At the same time, the project reinforced the emotional responsibility of design work and the need for better preparation around handling difficult conversations, especially in community-driven projects.
We generated change!
This project has inspired the people from the municipality of Emmen. They have been working hard to make Emma and our other ideas a tangible reality for their community.
Our project has been seen in action around the Emmen neighborhoods and it has been published in the “Luzerner Zeitung” and the “Emmenmail” journal in Summer of 2023.