About

I co-founded Civilla, a nonprofit design and research studio in Detroit, with Lena Selzer and Michael Brennan in 2015. For a decade we have worked inside the systems people rely on for food assistance, healthcare, and emergency relief.

Our work on Project Re:Form took Michigan's benefits application from more than forty pages to eighteen. Redesigning the form was half the work. The other half was adoption: winning approval from CMS and USDA, training more than 5,000 staff, and rolling the new version out across 100+ field offices statewide. The Harvard Kennedy School named it one of the top twenty-five innovations in American government.

Before and alongside Civilla, I spent ten years at Stanford's d.school as a student, fellow, and lecturer, teaching design innovation to graduate students and executives, and I return to Vanderbilt each year as a guest lecturer. Earlier I was design director at United Way for Southeastern Michigan. MS, Stanford (learning, design, and technology); BS, Vanderbilt (human and organizational development).

These days I'm focused on the adoption gap: AI capability is scaling far faster than public-serving institutions can absorb it. Closing that gap may be the most direct path back to faith in our institutions, and the window to do it is open now.

Right now that means a sector-wide research initiative, led with Lena Selzer: technology forecasting and trends analysis, paired with interviews with civic leaders and prominent design practitioners about the future of AI and design in public service.

Alongside the research, I design and build applied-AI systems for public benefits end to end: a deterministic rules core, retrieval, agents, and a small fine-tune, each shipped with the evaluation that makes it safe.

The Power in a Single Story, a talk on scaling social change by focusing on individuals, given for Poverty Solutions at the University of Michigan.

I've also spoken on this work at Michigan's schools of information, public policy, engineering, and business, and at Stanford, Vanderbilt, San Jose State, and Wayne State.

A profile of Civilla in Harvard's Social Impact Review.

An interview on prototyping with Scott Witthoft: why a small real change beats a majestic vision that never ships.

I also wrote Journey Maps, a booklet from Civilla's learning series on mapping complex journeys so research becomes useful to the people who act on it.

Coverage of the Civilla work itself (The New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Government Technology) is linked from the case studies.

Deep in the research: interviews with civic leaders and design practitioners, trends analysis, and the next pieces of writing. The prototypes range from small demonstrations to the Safety-Net AI cluster, a system-scale build for applied AI in public benefits.

I'm always looking to connect with leaders who treat an optimistic future for public institutions as the rational target, and who are building toward it.

Email hello@aselzer.com.

Also on LinkedIn and RSS.

When the writing ships, it ships here first. Wherever it travels afterward, the source of record is aselzer.com.