The craft of the civic designer has no school: it is learned with the body, and what is learned evaporates between one process and the next.
I've been at this for 20 years and nobody has taught me how to do a collaborative project. There is no school and no manual.
Every process teaches the same as the one before, because nobody pinned down what the one before taught.
When the facilitator adopts that attitude, the process has already failed.
The ethical-superiority bias and the trap of taking sides cannot be seen from inside. They are detected in writing, with distance. Or they are not detected at all.
First you experience it, then you turn it into a recipe.
The programme was set out in 2013 (recipes, rituals, tricks and amulets), but without a method to sustain it day by day.
The exact inversion of the usual chat: here the AI asks the questions and the human writes the answers.
After each session or day in the field, one question per turn, drawing on the method's repertoire: what do you feel about the territory that you have not yet put into words? who spoke and who did not? at what moment were you about to take sides?
The answers are saved as they are, in markdown, in your folder. The AI never writes the entry or “improves” it: your words are the content; it is the margin.
When something repeats, it shows you, quoting your own dated entries. No added interpretation. From each recognised pattern, you distil the recipe; the Notebook only pins it down.
The Pattern Map: what keeps recurring for you, said in your own words, and the recipe you distilled yourself.
You closed the session an hour ago. What happened in the last stretch that will not make it into the minutes?
Same thing again: at eight there were six people left and that's when the calendar got decided. The ones who left to pick up the kids didn't vote on anything.
“We finished at half past nine. The mothers had left at eight. The garden was voted on without them.”
“We extended ‘just ten minutes’ three times. Guess who was left at the end: the usual three.”
“Again. At eight there were six people left and that's when the calendar got decided.”
I close on time even if people are still talking. Whatever is left pending is not decided in the corridor: it opens the next session, with everyone inside.
distilled from entries 9 · 21 · 44 · 16 May 2026The other two objects: the Logbook Page (the day's entry: the AI's question small and grey, your answer large) and the Recipe Book (the distilled cards, ready to share with your team or with whoever is starting out: the manual nobody gave you, written by you).
Writing the reflection is the exercise. Delegating it would be exactly the mental shortcut that atrophies: here the friction is the product.
Everything lives in markdown, in your folder, readable without any application. If tomorrow you leave the tool, the notebook stays with you.
Without two dated quotations there is no pattern. The AI shows you what you wrote; the diagnosis is yours to make.
The ideal candidate: someone in the middle of a process who knows that a year from now they will not remember why they took the decisions that burn them today.
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