You explain the project in every conversation and it still hands you a template that would do for any city.
The AI starts with the Civic Design framework and your project dossier already loaded. The first question is already about your territory.
You ask for an actor map and it lists “the council, residents, associations”. Anyone's.
You get a prioritised map, with the sequence of who to activate first and why that order protects your legitimacy.
You spend hours tuning the prompt so the workshop it proposes is not the usual one.
You get complete session cards (objective, dynamic, materials, timings), chained to the previous one and ready to facilitate.
What it does not know about your process, it fills in with something plausible. And it does not warn you.
What you have not told it shows up marked as a gap, not filled in. What to do with it is still your call.
Not a one-off workshop, not a wall of sticky notes for the photo. It is the activation of collective intelligence, legitimised by inclusivity and transparency, not by representativeness. This method is built on that difference.
If you don't give it your territory, your actors and your tensions, it will not hand you a template filled with invented context: it hands you marked gaps. A dashboard of plausible but false data is this tool failing, not succeeding.
The AI structures, asks, orders and warns. It does not decide, it does not facilitate and it does not replace the room. If the AI does the diagnosis for you, you have not saved time: you have lost the process. Every module works one question at a time, with you and not instead of you.
Every session ends in something you can print and take to a meeting: a dashboard, a map, a timeline, three chained cards. Reviewable, iterable, defensible in front of your team or the administration.
Documents that work on the same process and feed each other. Worked example: liveable school playgrounds in Benimaclet, Valencia. Of each one we show a part, with the gaps inside, because the gap is the useful part.
What you take away · Included in the €19
Each document comes from a tool in the book Diseño Cívico, and the gap it leaves is the first question of the next.
Runs your project through the twelve starting points and marks the ones that still have no answer.
Nobody has said who looks after the playground once the grant runs out.
Orders who to activate and in what sequence, and shows the quadrant you haven't called.
The market quadrant is empty. The bars on the square open right opposite the playground.
Spreads the work across Situate, Socialise, Co-design and Implement on the calendar you actually have.
Fourteen weeks of process and not one of execution.
Participation without implementation is democratic frustration.
Writes each session in full (objective, dynamic, materials, timings) and chains it to the next.
2 h · 18 people · school playground
Objective: to name out loud the conflicts that already exist over the playground.
Materials: A0 plan, sticker dots, masking tape.
Sessions 2 and 3 are written with whatever comes out of this one.
What is missing in one document reappears as a condition in the next, and all of it stays in your project dossier. Every session leaves the AI knowing more about your process and less about participation in general.
More tools are being tested → Start · €19 one-off →Architect · urbanist
Civic designer
Community & Membership Lead
Democratic Society
Domenico Di Siena is an architect, urbanist and civic designer. He gave a name and a structure to a practice that already existed, scattered, and turned it into a teachable method: Civic Design, with its Civic Design Toolbox and its framework of situated collective intelligence.
His work starts at Dreamhamar (Hamar, Norway, 2010 and 2011), the process that by his own account invented civic design, and is forged in Madrid's 15M, in Think Commons, CivicWise and a decade of citizen labs and open broadcasts. Today he is the author of the book Diseño Cívico, drives Public Mesh and is Community & Membership Lead at Democratic Society.
Civic Design AI is the first materialisation of his civic AI line: a mature method, not a technology fashion, translated into a format that fits inside the AI you already use.
“Civic design looks further: it leaves a commons structured so that it keeps working once the professionals withdraw.”
“I explain the project three times and it still answers in general terms.”
The work you already do with AI, with method and in a fraction of the hours, so they go to the room and not to repeating the context.
“And who defends this when they start asking?”
Defensible processes: diagnosis, actor sequence and documentation that hold up the legitimacy in front of whoever asks.
“I need applied material, not more theory.”
A citable method with tools that students and teams use from day one.
Whichever you already use: ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot or another, in chat mode or in project mode. It is a platform-agnostic method: you upload the documents and start. Results vary by model and plan, and we do not give you a table of which performs best because it would be stale before you read it. We give you a five-minute test you can repeat every time you change AI.
No, and it is designed so that it cannot. The AI prepares the mechanical work (structuring, mapping, ordering, warning) and stops where the part only a person can do begins: judgement, relationship and the room. The cards do not replace facilitation; they are your starting point for it.
It is the right question. The method builds in deliberate friction: it does not generate outputs without real context, it sends you back to Situate if you try to start with the workshops, and it marks in red what is missing instead of filling it in. A fast, hollow process is exactly what this method fights, inside the AI too.
The seam exists and we prefer to show it: we start where you are, because a method that demands you build infrastructure before using it reaches nobody. The horizon (public, with a calendar) is that this same method runs on local, auditable models. Meanwhile the AI supports the process; it is never its centre.
The whole current package (the manual for each tool, the knowledge base, the working folder, the guided course with its two annexes and the example objects) and its corrections, forever. The new tools of the expanding toolbox launch as expansions or inside the community membership, at a preferential price for anyone who already bought.
The framework, the book, the complete Civic Design Toolbox (from which this method takes the tools that work before the process happens) and the community of practice live on the Civic Design portal, in your language. If this is the first time you hear about it, start there: the method is easier to understand from the practice than from the product.
The portal, in your language
civicdesign.ccThe four Civic Design portals: disenocivico.com (ES) · civicdesign.cc (EN) · civicdesign.it (IT) · designcivique.com (FR).