Right now, we’re watching something rare unfold in real time: a true public launch. NASA’s Artemis II program— a government-funded flyby mission that paves the way for a future moon landing — captured attention and imagination with open coverage, educational content, and a sense of shared curiosity that feels unmistakably civic. It is a reminder of what it looks like when public finance, public institutions, and public narratives work together to make collective life seem broad and aspirational.
At the same time, private ventures in space exploration and speculative technologies are often celebrated as the pinnacle of ambition, framed by logics of disruption and individual glory—think SpaceX-style branding and billionaire myths—even when they rely heavily on public contracts, infrastructure, and research. Billions of dollars These future projects flow, while libraries, schools, etc Civic institutions struggle to survive.
Communication design played a crucial role in making this feel natural. Private ambition is presented as bold and visionary, with stylish branding and compelling narratives that capture the audience’s attention, while public infrastructure is treated as stagnant and expendable.
Public Moon versus Private Moon
This disparity does not only reflect values; It effectively reinforces it, telling us that the future is something being built elsewhere, by private hands, not something we build together in our shared spaces. The consequences of this narrative are visible all around us. Libraries are among the most trusted and accessible civic institutions. Facing closures and budget cuts. Public transportation systems are struggling to modernize, and schools are forced to rely on temporary private funding to fill resource gaps.
At the same time, when public funds are clearly being used – as in New York City, where initiatives supported by Mayor Zahran Mamdani pay local residents decent wages. Clear snow during storms Or deploy crews to Repairing thousands of potholes– We see how people can experience their tax dollars first-hand by improving the spaces they move through every day.
As a communications design studio working in organizations today, we’ve learned to treat design as a civic tool that has the power to shape and push back cultural narratives. By reframing collective life as aspirational again, we can send a powerful message that defending the public imagination is worth investing in, not just for the future, or on other planets, but for the shared life we are building here. That’s why we need to treat design as a civic tool, and do so responsibly.
Ambition redesign
If design has helped normalize this narrative that private ambition is heroic, it also has the power and responsibility to change it. Communications design can reframe public infrastructure as a site of innovation, creativity and possibility.
This begins with making society distinct rather than integrated into it, making its human impact undeniably visible and felt. Libraries, for example, are at a crossroads. Essential to preserving our past and imagining our future, these vital public spaces face a very real risk of losing the federal funding that keeps them functioning. Now more than ever, we must reimagine a citywide network of library systems with a unified, public-facing language, making their civic role clear as essential places of learning, discussion, rest, and care. We must communicate clear explanations of how these buildings are financed, and the role communities can play in shaping what happens within them, before we lose them.
Design helps frame collective life when it celebrates the “ordinary.” Some of the most powerful innovations happen in everyday life. Post offices, for example, remain one of the last truly cosmopolitan civic centres. Everyone passes through it, but few feel called to stay. A reimagined post office becomes a civic focal point, bringing together postal, exhibition and other public services, designed to restore trust in the shared systems people already know.
Participation is another crucial element. Purposeful civic design invites people to participate, contribute, and feel ownership and belonging Shared responsibility becomes a daily reality. In civic action, this means creating common points of understanding between funders, institutions and communities to clarify who the work is for and why it matters. For example, a public-facing sewer system It could incorporate clear and explicit language into its collection methods, combined with a permanent or semi-permanent sanitation museum that showcases the work, history and public value of maintaining the continuity of the city.
And we can go further by making the flow of public funds itself visible, and clearly communicating when residents are paid through city programs like the one Mamdani is championing in New York, so people can see their taxes literally transformed into safer sidewalks and better streets.
When we show the impact of complex and largely invisible systems in human terms, not just numbers, they start to feel more important. The true impact of financing becomes easier to see and understand. Civic design creates narratives that position charities as partners in tangible systemic change, addressing urgent needs and gaps in public life. These visuals demonstrate on the ground the kind of collective ambition that philanthropy can align with and amplify, rather than just chasing high-profile, private-label “projects.”
Defending the public imagination
At its core, this shift is about championing the public imagination, reminding people that the future is not just something built in a lab or launched into space, but something we build together. When design helps people understand how shared systems work and who is responsible for them, it enhances civic life. When it obscures those questions, it weakens them.
Designers have a unique role to play in this effort, as they have the tools that shape how people see the world and what they believe is possible. By reframing public infrastructure as aspirational and necessary, we shift the narrative away from private ambition as the only way forward.
Branding and the design of civic spaces should excite us, disrupt us, and refuse to let us look away. At its best, it is work that shapes culture, makes power visible, and challenges inequality. At a moment of sharp cuts in federal funding and peak shared uncertainty, this work is now more urgent than ever. If Artemis 2 demonstrated what public ambition can look like, the challenge now is to bring the same clarity, vision and urgency back to Earth.
