An invitation to citizen
Rethinking our role in society — from passive consumers to active participants in shaping the future
Through conversations with passionate and mindful designers, The Design Thinking Roundtable explores how design can create change and social impact. In this episode Jon Alexander — storyteller, strategist and author of Citizens — explores the shift from seeing people as consumers to engaging them as citizens, tracing how his early career in advertising led him to question the stories shaping society and imagine a more participatory future.
Jon reframes citizenship as something we do, not something we have: a practice of contributing ideas, energy and care to shared outcomes. He outlines three dominant stories shaping society — subject, consumer and citizen — arguing that the consumer story underpinning much of modern design is no longer fit for today’s challenges. Instead, he calls for a move towards “citizen-centred design”, where the role of organisations is not to serve or control people, but to invite them into their own agency through participation, collaboration and collective problem-solving.
“Most of the stories we tell right now focus on how broken things are — but if we only stare into the chasm, we risk falling into it”
Jon highlights the power of storytelling in shifting what we pay attention to — from crisis and collapse to possibility and emergence. He positions himself not as an activist challenging broken systems — but as an actionist helping to build new ones, emphasising that meaningful change comes from creating alternative models that make the old ways obsolete.