Before sharing with you all these rich conversations as part of The Civic Design Room podcast, I wanted to share with you why I started this in the first place. I chose to embark on a media thesis to make my research accessible to everyone and to bring the richness of stories to the forefront. I have often struggled with the academic world, where valuable knowledge is often hidden behind paywalls. As someone who entered academia not through a pursuit of a PhD but for a love of learning, I found the existing modes of research inaccessible, thus unnecessarily blocking me from the vast amount of knowledge on academic campuses. Simultaneously, I gravitated towards the spoken word, primarily podcasts, where I learned immensely from the nuggets of conversations from those who came before me. I found deep learning by listening and knew that the conversations I would engage in for this podcast were ones from which I wanted the world to engage and learn. I also chose the podcast as a method for my thesis because I wanted to center storytelling and deep unpacking in my work, making it accessible to all.

I have always been fascinated by the how. How do things come to be? This curiosity has guided me through life and thus has made me fascinated with operations. I was never the kid who took part in a bike to see how the pieces would be combined to see what made the bike operate. I was instead the kid who looked at streets, who walked into a government service, who in classrooms always taught — how this came to be. I would ask my parents why things were how they were so often that they begged me to use that obsession to become a lawyer. This podcast was my time to ask how — to go into the nitty-gritty of doing that will allow listeners to walk away with a clear understanding of how someone did something. It is often through casual yet provoking conversation that one can dive into the how, which is what I have set out to do in this podcast.

As now the Innovation Team Director for the City of Atlanta, I find myself coming to these conversations almost daily, continuing to refine my principles of practice. I hope you find these podcast episodes and my thesis as valuable as they have been during my journey.