Center for Civic Design
Sean Isamu Johnson is a civic designer, researcher, and plain language lead at the Center for Civic Design since August 2020, focusing on creating user-friendly election materials and collaborating with elections offices across various levels of government. Previously, Sean served as a linguistic and plain language consultant for the Office for Justice Initiatives, developing evidence-based guidelines for website design and legal documents. Sean’s experience also includes roles as a linguistic annotator at the Information Sciences Institute and a linguistic analyst for the Forensic Linguistics Capital Case Innocence Project, where linguistic evidence was evaluated in wrongful conviction cases. Additionally, Sean has worked as a freelance linguistic consultant, service department manager at Harris Cyclery, intake assistant for the New England Innocence Project, and tutor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and UC Santa Cruz. Sean holds a master's degree in forensic linguistics from Hofstra University and a degree in linguistics from UC Santa Cruz.
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Center for Civic Design
To us, democracy is a design problem. The centerpiece of solving that problem is ensuring voter intent through design. Our goal is to make every interaction between government and citizens easy, effective, and pleasant. We bring civic design skills in research, usability, design, accessibility, and plain language to improve the voting experience, make elections easier to administer, and encourage participation in elections. Through our work, we have helped hundreds of election officials build their skills and capacity, and touched millions of voters in important ways. Across all of our projects, our research suggests that the voter journey—all of the information, decisions, interactions that get a voter from an intention to vote to actually casting a ballot—is a story of seemingly small barriers that can add up to a vote not cast. Our projects and research starts from the causes of those burdens. By smoothing out those barriers, our work can help more people vote, and strengthen democracy.