Communication Design Across On/Off in the Age of Digital Democracy: Designing Spaces for Constructive Citizen Dialogue, as Seen in Team Mirai's "Mirai Workshop"

In democratic practice, methods such as broad listening — analyzing large volumes of citizens' voices to identify issues and inform policy — are beginning to spread into local government and corporate settings alike.

Broad listening applied to survey responses or social media data, however, tends to collect and analyze individual opinions side by side. That leaves open the challenge of generating new insight through constructive dialogue among citizens, and of building a sense of acceptance through the process of discussion itself. How to design occasions for citizens to talk with one another is also an important theme from the standpoint of the basic civic experience in a democracy.

This session takes the "Mirai Workshop," run by Team Mirai, as one case study. It looks at how a space was designed for citizens to talk openly and constructively across differences of position and generation, and how the discussions and voices that emerged there were broad-listened to and relayed onward at high resolution.

The workshop was held across eight venues nationwide, ten sessions in total, involving close to 500 citizens, on the theme of what "a country where the future can be believed in" concretely looks like and what bottom-up civic community activity toward it should be. To let participants discuss such an abstract social theme constructively and concretely, care went into the communication design as well as the overall workshop structure — including a purpose-built AI application. Although the workshop was organized by a political party, its content carried little party coloring, and this session is likewise planned to stay unaligned with any particular political camp.

Attendees should leave with concrete methods and examples on three fronts: designing a constructive dialogue process that combines in-person deliberation with broad listening so that citizens themselves gain new insight; communication design that makes a space easy to join across diverse positions and generations; and practical approaches to catalyzing varied social activity bottom-up, starting from citizens.