Project

Voice to Vision (V2V)

Maggie Hughes

Groups

Voice to Vision

Voice to Vision (V2V) is a collaborative research and civic technology project that bridges the gap between community voices and public decision-making. Too often, residents share their perspectives in meetings and surveys without ever seeing how their input influenced outcomes. V2V directly addresses this transparency gap by building interactive platforms that trace how individual and collective voices shape policies and plans.

The project was first designed through a partnership process with the New York City Department of City Planning and a cohort of community members from Jamaica, Queens. Together, we co-developed an initial version of the platform to reflect how resident voices shaped planning decisions—an iteration that can be explored here: v2v-jamaicaplan.ccc-mit.org.

At present, V2V is being deployed with civic leaders to help them engage more effectively with large volumes of qualitative community input. Leaders are often overwhelmed by resident feedback and struggle to incorporate it meaningfully into policy. V2V provides tools that organize and visualize this data, making it easier to understand, act on, and remain accountable to. Soon, we will also launch deployments with community-based organizations, offering public-facing interfaces that show residents how their voices matter in the decision-making process.

The project draws from the same underlying data but offers two tailored interfaces—one for civic leaders, emphasizing synthesis and policy relevance, and one for communities, emphasizing transparency and recognition. This dual design makes V2V both a practical tool for governance and a living experiment in how technology can strengthen democratic participation.

Research Contributions

From a research perspective, V2V contributes new evidence on how transparency and feedback mechanisms shape perceptions of governance. In both controlled lab studies and real-world deployments, we have found that the platform can improve participants’ sense of fairness and legitimacy, foster perspective opening, and increase horizontal transparency—clarity about how different voices relate to one another.

When testing personalized interfaces, however, results are mixed. For some participants, seeing their own words explicitly cited deepens feelings of being respected and heard. For others, the same personalization can feel performative or inauthentic, even diminishing trust. This tension highlights the importance of design nuance in civic technology, and our research continues to investigate under what conditions personalization strengthens legitimacy versus undermines it.

Ultimately, Voice to Vision demonstrates how technology can be designed as civic infrastructure—anchored in real contexts, guided by rigorous research, and committed to strengthening trust and agency in public life.

Research Topics

#artificial intelligence #communications #community