Workathon: Building Chat AI Assistants Design Sprint
Participants co-designing the NYC 311 Chat Assistant at NYU-ITP in Spring 2026.
With an intentional focus on building projects with the civic tech community, the Femmecubator team in partnership with Superbloom conducted a training session to revisit the now defunct NYC 311 chat service. The team sprinted through building a chatbot sandbox, and introduced educational workflows for future Conversational UI Designers.
Civic Tech Camp is a one-day summit where industry experts, students, technologists, and designers collaborate on projects for social good. To reinforce support for the CTC teams with active projects, Femmecubator and Superbloom created something adjacent: a design sprint where anyone from the community has the opportunity to see behind the scenes of how the Bridge bot project was built.
First: a little backstory
Open Civic Tech fellows took on zero-to-one project of standing up a chat service platform where they researched, designed, and launched a working prototype called the Bridge Labs. The process included interview time with a research team from UC San Diego, and focused on the opportunity to support 200,000+ families, and provide IEP guidance for school children with Autism. It taught the team to upskill on design methods from modeling to testing. They also adopted a CD workflow taught by Conversational Design Institute experts. That prototype is now live. And the lessons learned from building it became the curriculum for this workshop.
Applying this process to a new project, we learned that the NYC 311 MyCity Bot had been decommissioned after it was caught giving illegal advice to tenants. We started by inquiring what areas could be improved if this was redesigned using the Conversational Design workflow and modeling it with content guardrails and fallback scripts.
What the design sprint looks like
The working set up was collaborative, hands-on, and intentionally structured to move through the full arc of conversation design.
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