Community Power: Alliance Design Circles

What if we had a simple process for addressing complex issues like climate change?

Need some good news??? This little video might just be the best 5 minutes and 38 seconds you will spend this week. Thank you, Alec Asten and Firesite Films!

“There is nothing as powerful as a community that knows what it wants,” wrote Meg Wheatley, but discerning what the community wants isn’t easy. When you have people of different cultures and ages, different areas of expertise, and different perspectives, figuring out a shared direction and purpose is not easy. 

The Alliance uses what we call “design circles,” a simple process liberated from the Stanford d-School design thinking model (also used at MIT, Harvard, and design-based enterprises everywhere) and mixed with Indigenous problem-solving traditions and community organizing; tested and revised in New York City and Puerto Rico by communities rebuilding after disasters. 

Thanks to a grant from Restore America’s Estuaries and the Long Island Sound Partnership, we were able to spend last year with over 300 young people, using Design Circles to focus their thinking on the challenges we are facing in our watershed communities. The biggest issues on their minds? Our relationships with the rest of Nature, flooding, and pollution. Outcomes of the circles included a relationship-learning card game and budget prioritizations in flood simulations with a fictional town remarkably like Mystic. Meeting with local oyster farmers Beth Simonds (Stonington Farms Shellfish) and Ashley & Jason Hamilton (6-Penny Farms) inspired an outpouring of ideas. Do you wish you had been able to participate?? You CAN!

The ideas generated by design circles, youth and mixed age, are contributing to the Watershed Regeneration Action Plan. Join us in multi-age design circles this (2026) summer and fall!! They will be based on the findings of the Mystic River Vulnerability Assessment (I-95 north to Lantern Hill)!! What will we do about River Road?  Old Mystic? Long and Bush Ponds? Send an email to maggie@alliancemrw.org to participate!  All you need to say is: Design Circles sound great. Sign me up and keep me posted!

Are you a parent or educator?

Here is a note from a teacher who has begun using design circles in his STEM classes. Tim Thayer, Stonington Middle School…

I have found that the Design Circles framework—which cycles through Learn, Feel, Imagine, Plan, Enact, and back to Learn—is highly effective in my STEM lessons. While the traditional Engineering Design Process works well for problem-solving, Design Circles creates a climate of empathy and deeper personal investment, especially with younger students like my 6th graders.

Our prosthetics unit illustrates this well. Students were tasked with creating a prosthetic for one of their stuffed animals. By starting with the "Learn and Feel" phases, students developed genuine empathy for the animals they were helping. They invested imagination and care into their work—giving their stuffed animals personalities and spirits—which motivated them to research solutions that would help their "clients" live comfortably. The depth of their creativity and inquiry exceeded my expectations.

This empathic foundation proved powerful when students met Charlotte, a sea turtle at Mystic Aquarium who had suffered a real injury and required a prosthetic. Students recognized their own design challenge reflected in Charlotte's lived experience. They understood not just the engineering problem, but the emotional and ethical dimensions of their work. They discovered career pathways in veterinary rehabilitation while learning that their designs could genuinely improve lives. The Design Circles framework transformed the project from a technical exercise into a meaningful exploration of care, responsibility, and purpose.