Christopher Le Dantec is a professor jointly appointed between Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the College of Arts, Media and Design, where he serves as Director of Initiatives in Digital Civics. His work challenges the dominant “smart cities” narrative of efficiency and optimization, instead centering principles of inclusion, mutual aid, and care in the design of civic technologies.

Le Dantec’s research applies human-centered computing to the intersection of digital democracy and urban life. Through collaborations with grassroots organizations and advocacy groups, he develops computing interfaces that support collective action and community-driven governance. His projects span on-demand transit labor conditions, citizen science initiatives monitoring bird-building collisions, and data advocacy toolkits for nonprofits.

Before joining Northeastern in 2023, Le Dantec spent nearly two decades at Georgia Tech, where he directed the Human-Centered PhD Program, the MS-HCI Program, and co-directed the Public Participation Lab. He is the author of Designing Publics (MIT Press, 2016) and regularly publishes in top human-computer interaction venues including CHI, CSCW, and DIS.

For this edition of the Scholar Spotlight series, CTM Communications Research Assistant Vivica Dsouza spoke with Le Dantec about why he came to Boston, what “care” looks like as a design principle, and how AI’s rapid adoption in cities might avoid repeating the mistakes of the smart cities era.

The following interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

CTM: You joined Northeastern in 2023 after nearly two decades at Georgia Tech. What drew you here specifically to build out global initiatives in digital civics?

Christopher Le Dantec: There was a shift in problems I had been working on in Atlanta and at Georgia Tech, and I wanted to see how they translate to a very different kind of city, a very different urban and political environment. Building that out more thickly with the number of universities and organizations doing work in Boston was really appealing.

Coming from the smart cities era, Boston was always a gold standard in cities that were embracing new technology and new ways of thinking about how to use that technology to both engage citizens and residents but also transform how city government ran. Atlanta has also been doing some remarkable things to embrace technology and new ways of relating to communities. But they’re very different, operating at different registers. Moving here was really a chance to take what I had learned and established in Atlanta and think about it in a very different kind of space.

CTM: A lot of your recent work examines labor and data in civic contexts—from on-demand transit drivers to citizen science volunteers monitoring bird-building collisions. What’s driving your interest in how different types of civic work get valued or made visible through data?

Le Dantec: The thing driving the work is really trying to understand the opportunities, but also the limits of framing civic engagement with and through data. One of the things I’ve been wrestling with more recently is that as we make the shift out of the smart cities era of technology transformation into the AI era, if we only frame civic engagement and the ability to make change through a lens of data, then I think we end up limiting our ability to make different kinds of change.

We need to think more critically and carefully about the role that technology plays—not just in enabling us to collect and analyze and work with data, but how it also enables us to communicate, to mobilize, and to organize. To enable different forms of both civic engagement and modes of engagement and activism that might fall outside affirmative modes of sustaining the status quo.

CTM: In your research on tools for data advocacy with communities, you’ve talked about moving beyond efficiency and productivity toward care and mutual aid. When you’re working with grassroots organizations, what does “care” actually look like as a design principle?

Le Dantec: Part of it comes down to thinking through how technologies help mediate relationships. Relationships take all sorts of different kinds of work to establish and to maintain, and it’s not about the transactional mode of exchange that we often get when we think about a product-client relationship.

One of the consequences of the smart cities evolution was that it really put into high relief this neoliberal metaphor of the city as being a provider of services and residents being consumers of those services. Then data becomes a way to optimize that relationship. But that relationship is characterized very transactionally—I pay the city to collect my trash, and the city should collect my trash in the most efficient way possible. Or I pay taxes so I can drive on the roads, and the city should make sure those roads don’t have potholes.

Of course, those things are true, but that flattens the kinds of relationships that we have in a larger civic ecosystem. Part of what I’m trying to do when we push beyond efficiency or productivity is support all the different kinds of relationships that emerge through community interaction. Because it’s through those relationships and that interaction that we get a new imaginary of how the city should be.

What we forget is that cities aren’t products that sit on a shelf that we go and purchase and then use, or that we subscribe to and then use. Cities are emergent things that are created through the act of living there, and through the choices we make as individuals, as collections of individuals, in terms of what kind of city we want. Do we want a city that is focused on the outdoors, or one that has a rich and vibrant arts community, or one that has emphasis on economic development for people who have traditionally been excluded from development? Those are relational things. Those require knowing each other, building trust between each other, being able to help support and build the ability to take action. That’s all very different than just asking whether the basic services are running efficiently.

CTM: Your book Designing Publics came out in 2016. We’re now in a very different technological moment—with generative AI, platform governance debates, and cities increasingly adopting AI-driven systems for everything from resource allocation to surveillance. How has your thinking about what constitutes a “public” evolved, and what worries you most about these shifts?

Le Dantec: The central argument of that book is that through intentional design-based research programs, we can build out capacities for communities to confront all sorts of different technology, policy, and social challenges. It’s through structuring our intervention around making change in the world, and then through that, being able to create not just a product or a one-time response, but a whole set of capacities and skills and knowledges to continually evolve and respond to those challenges. That’s still clearly the case and is still an important enterprise to undertake within universities and institutions that have the flexibility and capacity to do that.

The risks of big platform technology that were only really starting to emerge when that book came out are ossified and clear at this point. We know that there are extraordinary downsides to the platform economy that we have now, to the scale of the surveillance apparatus—whether it’s by the state or by industry—and how that trickles down into everyday use and the way that people have access to information and access to each other. The challenges have only become more present.

The thing that I keep struggling with is I don’t know exactly how to recapture an optimism that would see a way through it. It’s been doom and gloom for a while, and the doom and the gloom is only getting darker. Fifteen years ago, it was incredibly optimistic still. For that pendulum to swing so far the other way—I keep waiting for signs that it’ll come back. And I think it will, partly through the action that we choose to take as community members, as people who come together to address these challenges. I think it starts locally, it starts small. But through that, it can gain some momentum and can become federated responses to what are ultimately fairly large and existential challenges to the kinds of society that we imagine we would like to be living in.

CTM: How do you see the connection between your work and CTM’s mission? What kinds of collaborations could you envision?

Le Dantec: I think we are all working along a similar trajectory. Media is one medium, and there are different places to figure out how we think about the way people communicate and how they have access to information, and how they take action on that information. One of the things that is at the center of the Digital Civics Initiative is really a focus on the action part. What are the ways that technology mediates action and helps people amplify their own abilities to be effective in the world, whether that’s with five neighbors as they try to organize something, or whether that’s through a national coalition of people who are trying to respond to the state of things.

I think they complement each other very much. Collaborations come by way of finding those specific topics that we care about and want to bring people together on, or through thinking about new opportunities to break down both intellectual and disciplinary boundaries. Are there ways of knowing and ways of understanding what’s going on in the world that media scholars may have that are important for computing scholars or design scholars to understand, and vice versa? Through that, we can generate not just new intellectual conversation, but new opportunities for intervention and for response.

CTM: What kinds of questions or projects are emerging from your digital civics work at Northeastern that you’re excited to explore—whether through research, teaching, or community partnerships?

Le Dantec: As much as I’m kind of tired of talking about AI a lot, clearly the thing that has emerged is: how do we think through this AI transformation in a way that doesn’t repeat some of the same challenges or same mistakes that we had through the smart cities transformation?

We’re trying to figure out two sides of this coin. One is: how are cities responding to this moment? Both in terms of formal policy and statute and how AI may or may not be used within municipal government and the different things that city employees do. We’re also interested in the mundane, day-to-day ways that city employees are using AI that maybe have nothing to do with mandates or other kinds of top-down initiatives, but just the “I want to go home by 5pm, and this is the best way for me to be able to do that.”

We’re trying to look past this moment where, when the smart cities transformation happened, it consolidated certain kinds of power in organizations in ways that were new. Are there opportunities to look at how this new moment of technology transformation can be used to either rebalance or to think through very intentionally where power and authority gets consolidated?

It’s the same thing on the community side. How can we build these technologies or interfaces to these technologies in a way that supports communities, particularly lower-resource organizations that are working in a grassroots mode, where they don’t maybe have a lot of resources or technical capacity? LLMs offer, in some ways, a very approachable initial interface to thinking through manipulating data, working with process and procedure. Can we use that to help amplify some capabilities in local community organizations and do it in a way that helps them become more effective when they interface with city government, when they interface with a larger organization or institution?

CTM: You’ve worked with communities on issues like transportation equity, food security, and climate resilience. Are there any examples—either from your own work or that you’ve observed—where you’ve seen digital civics tools genuinely shift power or influence policy outcomes?

Le Dantec: The project that most embodies that was from Atlanta, probably a decade old at this point. The City of Atlanta and the owner of the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta United MLS team built a new professional stadium in the city, and in doing that, did some real damage to relationships with the communities around the construction site. As a result, they ran a project to try to rebuild trust and engagement with those communities. We were part of the effort to do that repair work.

What we did over the course of nine months was train a group of residents who went out and did two sets of interviews. First, they interviewed fellow residents on their experience of the construction project and mega-development over a long history in those neighborhoods. But then they also interviewed employees across every functioning agency within the City of Atlanta to understand what were the different kinds of community engagement work that each of those agencies did—how did it happen, what were the goals, what were the constraints?

What came out of this was, in some ways, a very non-digital thing. It was a playbook that organized best practices grounded in current experience in Atlanta, so that we had practices for city officials when they were looking to engage with community—ways that they could do that effectively and thoughtfully. And then a set of practices for community organizations who needed to engage with the city so that they could come into that engagement prepared and be able to be effective.

But the biggest outcome was that we had, as a result of residents interviewing city employees, 30 residents who had deep insight into how the city worked. They understood suddenly, in a new way, why some things didn’t work the way they wanted. Instead of having an adversarial relationship where the knee-jerk reaction would have been “the city doesn’t care about us, they only care about the wealthy neighborhoods, they only care about predominantly white neighborhoods”—instead they had an understanding that there were a set of constraints that these employees were facing that had nothing to do with whether they cared about the neighborhood or not. In fact, they did care about all the residents of Atlanta, but there was a whole set of other things that were invisible if you weren’t actually a city employee.

That provided a vehicle for understanding and insight and trust-building, because then those residents were out at community meetings explaining what they understood. Their communities trusted them and knew that they weren’t just telling stories. It started to do the work of rebuilding the working relationship with these communities that were harmed during the development process, so that they could start to think through, future-looking, how do we move towards a version of the city, a version of our community that we want to inhabit?

I think that process was very much a design process—thinking through how do we design not an artifact, not a system, but an interaction and a set of conversations. That’s an example of the kind of work that I do, where you get that positive impact. It doesn’t always require technology necessarily, although often technology is a byproduct, because that becomes a way of sustaining and mediating conversation over a longer period of time.

CTM: For CAMD students interested in the intersection of media, technology, and civic engagement—whether they’re in journalism, communication, or design—how might they get involved with digital civics work or connect with your initiatives?

Le Dantec: Part of it is through coursework. There are different research opportunities for students. In computer science, there’s a new research apprenticeship course where students can take a research-driven class for credit. There are a number of faculty involved—the Digital Civics Initiative is meant to help establish the network and make visible the network of faculty and researchers that are doing work in a civic sense here.

There’s a whole range of folks that are involved. Looking across that network of faculty, labs, and centers, there are definitely opportunities to connect. Between folks at CAMD, folks over in CSSH, folks in law, folks in Bouvé who are doing public health things that also fit within a very broad understanding of civically engaged work—depending on students’ interests, there are lots of opportunities to connect.

My encouragement to students would be: when you find faculty, or you find a project or a topic that you care about, have the conversation. It’s typically an easy yes for a student who comes and says, “I care about doing this. Let’s work on something together.”