The Design of Trust

How place-based, regenerative design rebuilds fractured relationships between communities and institutions

When Laetitia Wolff arrived in Brownsville, Brooklyn in 2016 to work on community-police relations, she encountered a striking statistic: the local precinct received the lowest level of community-reported information across New York City. Trust, measured in silence, had effectively reached zero. The police department's proposed solution was a digital screen in the precinct foyer to broadcast messages. Wolff's response revealed a fundamental tension in civic design: those commissioning solutions often skip directly past the problem itself.

The screen proposal exemplified top-down thinking—institutional communication flowing one direction, assuming passive reception solves active distrust. Wolff's counter-approach began by questioning why residents avoided the precinct entirely. Her methodology, which she terms "place-based design," operates from a deceptively simple premise: understand the specific context before proposing universal solutions. In Brownsville, this meant mapping not just physical spaces but narrative ones—why the neighborhood's reputation centered exclusively on negative stories, and how residents had internalized this external judgment.

This philosophy aligns with regenerative design, an emerging framework that extends beyond sustainability's goal of maintaining equilibrium. Where sustainable design asks "how do we minimize harm," regenerative design asks "what benefits can we return to the system?" For designers, this represents a paradigm shift from extractive resource use toward cyclical reciprocity with communities and environments. The concept has proliferated rapidly—perhaps too rapidly, joining "sustainability" and "resilience" in the lexicon of fashionable buzzwords whose meanings blur with overuse.

Yet Wolff's work demonstrates concrete applications. In another Brooklyn community project in East New York, she identified a structural invisibility: the 24-hour corner shops that anchored neighborhood life remained absent from official urban development narratives. These establishments—often immigrant-owned, operating on tight margins, staffed by proprietors with limited English—felt no claim to participate in city planning conversations reshaping their commercial corridors. Wolff's intervention was procedural rather than aesthetic: creating mechanisms for these stakeholders to voice interests and assert legitimacy in municipal dialogues.

The economic implications are significant. Urban development typically flows through established channels—community boards, business improvement districts, formal advocacy organizations. Wolff's methodology reveals a hidden infrastructure of actual community function that operates outside these structures. When cities invest millions in neighborhood revitalization without engaging the granular networks that residents actually use, resources often fail to address lived needs. The designer's role becomes archaeological: excavating existing social capital before overlaying new systems.

This approach requires deliberate humility. Wolff describes her function as curatorial—assembling designers around problems larger than individual practice, facilitating cross-disciplinary collaboration. She organizes "designer speed dating" events that pair professionals with non-designers, explicitly to confront assumptions and dismantle expertise myths. The format succeeds because it acknowledges asymmetric knowledge: designers understand process; community members understand context. Neither knows everything; both must acknowledge vulnerability.

The broader question concerns scalability. Place-based design, by definition, resists standardization. Each context demands separate research, relationship-building, and iteration. This poses challenges for institutions seeking efficient, replicable interventions. Yet Wolff's projects suggest that the alternative—solutions imposed without contextual understanding—waste resources through misalignment with actual needs. The Brownsville police precinct could install screens; whether anyone would watch them, trust their content, or modify behavior accordingly remained unknown. Place-based design may be slower, but its outputs align with the problems they purport to solve. In an era of declining institutional trust, that alignment represents its own efficiency.

What we’re into this week

Scott

Laetitia’s work reminds me so much of Bret Victor's "Inventing on Principle" is a thoughtful examination of what principle-driven invention can look like and how it differs from problem-derived invention. Bret presents numerous examples based on his own principles and then discusses other principles in various areas. This presentation has had a massive impact on software development, and continues to shape the industry.

Ana

Oh that’s so funny, Scott, because her work reminds me of the Agile Manifesto! 

Aaron

So hopeful, both of you! Thinking about Laetitia’s work actually reminded me of the CX Pod discussion from last week, the one on synthetic data. As in: Laetitia’s work is the opposite of it. 

A Forbes article I read as research for that discussion reads like a manifesto to synthetic data, and now that I’ve talked to Laetitia, I can’t help but see the gaping hole in their reasoning: sometimes there’s no data at all and you don’t even know it. If, like in Laetitia’s East New York project, stakeholders don’t talk to you at all, but you don’t even realize that because you’ve got data sets that tell you nothing’s wrong, orgs are going to make a bunch of missteps.  

CX Research—Documented

Laetitia brings stakeholders together to solve community problems through getting to know them, their hopes, and their fears. You can convene these conversations, too, with the HCD Discovery Guide. Whether you’re working in the streets of New York, a conference room in Topeka, or a backyard in Bakersfield, you can get rigorous, modular guidance on how to have meaningful customer and stakeholder conversations, no matter what your context.  

The Discovery Guide was developed alongside thousands of professionals working in healthcare, veteran support, education, and operations. When you open this Guide, you'll see: 

1. The Why and How of customer research.

2. Step-by-step, modular instruction that you can dip in and out of easily. 

3. Plain language for working professionals. 

Buy the book at Barnes and Noble, Amazon, or at Ishmael Interactive. (Psst: when you buy at Ishmael Interactive, you get the ebook version included!)

You don't need a full UX or CX team to get to know your customers: you need the HCD Discovery Guide. 

Credits

Guest: Laetitia Wolff
Producer: Ana Monroe
Text: A Adams

Artwork: Head of a Woman. 1908. Egon Schiele. Via the National Gallery

Why this artwork:  Schiele shows us a woman in a cropped posture, with skin that’s marked with odd crayon strokes. Her claw-like hand and wary eyes seem to throw into doubt the security or sanity of the life that she’s living. If we met her, would we think she’s worth talking to? Would we take her word, as a stakeholder?