By Kathryn Yap - 14th October, 2026

New Tools, Better Questions: Rethinking Civic Engagement Through Technology

What becomes possible when the tools become faster, more visual, and easier to scale?

On September 15, the AIA New York Social Science and Architecture Committee brought together practitioners working across urban strategy, augmented reality, civic data, and community engagement for Civic Tech, Civic Voice: Rethinking How Communities Shape Cities. Melissa Marsh, PLASTARC founder and co-founder of AIANY’s Social Science and Architecture Committee, moderated the conversation, which explored how new tools can help people understand proposed changes earlier, participate in more ways, and follow what happens to their input afterward.

Nearly four years after the committee’s first conversation on participatory design and community engagement, the panel returned to a familiar question with new tools in play: how can better information lead to better decisions?

Old methods, new speed

The biggest shift in community engagement may be the speed of the feedback cycle, from gathering input to making sense of it and responding. Neysa Pranger, Principal and Co-Founder of UrbanSense, traced that evolution from clipboards and PalmPilots to digital platforms and LLM-assisted analysis. The tools have changed, but the underlying challenge remains whether faster engagement can lead to better decisions unless humans are in the loop.

Listening to the City, a 2002 town hall at the Jacob Javits Center, offered an early example of technology successfully supporting participation at scale. Around 5,000 people gathered to respond to six proposals for Ground Zero, working across 500 facilitated tables with laptops and voting tools feeding input to a central team in real time. Looking back, Pranger saw many of the same steps used in engagement today: gathering and synthesizing ideas, prioritizing them, and validating what was heard.

What has changed is speed and affordability: synthesis that once required a centralized team can now happen in minutes. What remains untested is whether newer tools can support engagement at the same scale.

“The tools finally make engagement affordable. Making sure the room looks like the community is still a very human task.” — Neysa Pranger, UrbanSense

Putting the future in front of people

Planning information may be public, but zoning documents, hearings, and renderings still ask people to imagine places that do not yet exist. Dana Chermesh-Reshef, Founder and CEO of inCitu, approached that gap through visibility.

inCitu uses location-based augmented reality to place proposed buildings, infrastructure, and zoning scenarios into the places where they may eventually exist. In Kauai County, Hawaiʻi, AR was used to communicate one of nine proposed urban design code amendments addressing wildfire risk; Chermesh said the amendment was adopted quickly.

The strongest applications, Chermesh noted, place AR within a broader engagement process alongside walking tours, public events, and other outreach. Its value is in translating technical planning information into something people can see and respond to in context.

“What if we could show people the future through the palm of their hands?” — Dana Chermesh-Reshef, inCitu

Closing the loop

Once people participate, another question follows: what happens to everything they share? Maggie Hughes, Co-Founder of Convoca, focused on making community input easier to interpret, trace, and connect back to the findings and decisions it informs.

While co-designing an engagement process for the Jamaica Neighborhood Plan in Queens, the team found that a database-style interface didn't connect with community members. They redesigned it using scrollytelling, combining data visualization, audio, and real community voices in a narrative that unfolds as the reader scrolls. Hughes compared the format to New York Times data stories, where information and visuals change as readers move through the page.

“Storytelling beats the database every time.” — Maggie Hughes, Convoca

Her experiments with AI reinforced the value of transparency: participants responded more positively to seeing the range of community input than to highly personalized AI feedback, which produced more mixed reactions.

What comes next

The conversation pointed to a broader question for architects and designers: how can these tools make engagement more useful without losing sight of the people behind the data? For the AIANY Social Science and Architecture Committee, that question extends a decade-long exploration of how social research can inform architectural practice. As the committee looks ahead, the challenge is not simply adopting new tools, but asking how they can support better participation, clearer feedback, and more informed decisions about the built environment.

About the Author

Kathryn Yap, Assoc. AIA, is a sociospatial designer at PLASTARC with a background in architecture and design research. Her work explores how people experience and use space, focusing on workplace research, inclusive design, and community-centered projects.