Designing and Having Difficult Conversations with Michael Arnold Mages
This week, Heinz alums James Reid and Laura Calloway sit down with Dr. Michael Arnold Mages. Dr. Mages's research interests include "creating work that supports participants' understanding of their own intersectional identity as a component of a conversation, and creating work that can support conversations that are difficult, or high-stakes, or where one or more participants are in a leveraged position."
In addition to sharing some insights about how to have better difficult conversations in general, Dr. Mages dives into his past work with a coalition of veterans associations, with stakeholders and city planners deciding the future of a highway corridor, and with a variety of people and organizations who came together under President Obama’s White House initiative, My Brother's Keeper.
At CMU, Dr. Mages taught classes like Designing Civic Conversations, the Senior Studio: SpeakLab, Information Design, and Design Thinking. Outside of academia, he is the Creative Director for think make do, a strategy and design consultancy, and in 2015 he co-founded The Art of Democracy, a company that designs engagement strategies for communities, local governments, corporations and nonprofits using the principles and practices of deliberative democracy.