Right now, we’re watching a rarity unfold in real time: an actual public view of the moon. NASA’s Artemis II program—a government-funded flight mission that paves the way for future lunar landings—has captured attention and imagination through open coverage, educational content and a sense of shared curiosity that feels decidedly civic. It’s a reminder of what it looks like when public funding, public institutions, and public storytelling work together to make collective life feel expansive and ambitious.
At the same time, private ventures in space exploration and speculative technologies are often celebrated as the pinnacle of ambition, framed through the logic of disruption and individual glory—think SpaceX-Style branding and billionaire mythology—even when they rely heavily on public contracts, infrastructure, and research. Billions of dollars are pouring into these future projects, while libraries, schools and others civic institutions struggle to survive.
Communication design has played a critical role in making this feel normal. Private ambition is presented as bold and visionary, with sleek brands and compelling narratives that capture public attention, while public infrastructure is treated as stagnant and expendable.
Public versus private moonshot
This inequality does more than just reflect values; it actively reinforces them, telling us that the future is something that is being built elsewhere, by private hands, rather than something that we are building together in our shared spaces. And the consequences of that narrative are visible all around us. Libraries, some of the most reliable and accessible civic institutions, face closures and budget cuts. Public transit systems struggle to modernize, and schools are forced to rely on temporary private funding to fill gaps in resources.
Meanwhile, when public money is used conspicuously—as in New York City, where initiatives championed by the mayor Zohran Mamdani pay local residents suitable wages for it pure snow during storms or send crews to repair thousands of potholes—We see how directly people can experience their tax dollars improving the spaces they move through every day.
As a communication design studio working in institutions today, we have learned to treat design as a civic tool with the power to shape and push back cultural narratives. By reframing collective life as ambitious once again, we can send a powerful message: protecting the public imagination is something worth investing in, not just for the future or on other planets, but for the shared life we’re building here. This is why we must treat design as a civic tool and do it responsibly.
Redesigning ambition
If design has helped normalize this narrative that private ambition is heroic, it also has the power and responsibility to change it. Communication design can reframe public infrastructure as a place of innovation, creativity and opportunity.
This starts with making the municipality stand out rather than blend in, making its human impact undeniably seen 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 language that makes their civic role unmistakable as essential places for learning, debate, rest, and care. We need to communicate clearly visible explanations of how these buildings are funded and the role communities can play in shaping what happens inside them, before we lose them.
Design helps frame collective life when it celebrates the “ordinary”. Some of the most powerful innovations happen every day. Post offices, for example, remain one of the last truly universal civic centers. Everyone goes through them, but few feel invited to linger. A re-imagined post office becomes a civic focal point, combining postal services with displays and other public services designed to restore confidence in the shared systems people already know.
Participation is another essential element. Meaningful civic design invites people to engage, contribute and feel a sense of ownership and belonging so that Shared responsibility becomes a daily reality. In civic work, this means creating points of public understanding between funders, institutions and communities to make clear who the work is for and why it matters. For example, a sanitary system with a public view it could include clear, spoken language on its collection routes, combined with a permanent or semi-permanent sewer museum that shows the work, history and public value of keeping a city running.
We can go further by making the flow of public money itself visible, clearly communicating when residents are paid through city programs like those championed by Mamdani in New York, so that people can literally see their taxes go back into safer sidewalks and better streets.
When we show the impact of complex, largely invisible systems in human terms, not just in numbers, they begin to feel more important. The real impact of funding becomes easier to see and understand. Civic design creates narratives that position philanthropies as partners in tangible systemic change, addressing pressing needs and gaps in public life. These visible, on-the-ground programs demonstrate the kind of collective ambition that philanthropy can match and amplify, rather than just chasing high-profile, private label “honshots.”
Protecting the public imagination
At its core, this shift is about protecting the public imagination, reminding people that the future isn’t just something being built in a lab or launched into space, but something we’re building together. When design helps people understand how shared systems work and who is responsible for them, it strengthens civic life. When you obscure those questions, you weaken it.
Designers have a unique role to play in this effort, holding the tools that shape how people see the world and what they believe is possible. By reframing public infrastructure as ambitious and essential, we shift the narrative away from private ambition as the only path to progress.
Branding and designing civic spaces should provoke, disrupt and refuse to let us look away. At its best, it is a culture-shaping act that makes power visible and challenges inequality. At a time of severe federal funding cuts and shared uncertainty, this work is now more urgent than ever. If Artemis II shows what public ambition can look like, the challenge now is to bring that same clarity, visibility and urgency to Earth.
