In March 2024, Cordillera Applications Group’s Strategic Design & Innovation (SDI) team conducted an on-site immersive design inquiry for the New York City Police Department’s Counterterrorism Division. The Designing Strategies for Counter-Domestic Violent Extremism (C-DVE) inquiry focused on the present and escalating emerging challenge and impact of domestic violent extremism on New York City. The multi-day design effort over two weeks centered on CAG’s Design and Counter-DVE Strategies program, providing a blend of counterterrorism (CT) and counter-DVE (C-DVE) education within multi-disciplinary design and planning methodologies. NYPD participants, working in design teams, applied innovative approaches to consider new ways to prepare, respond, and gain advantage against these emerging and future threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk to the safety, security, and protection of populations/communities and the functioning of their organizations.
Dr. David Kilcullen provided a backdrop and baselining of the evolution of terrorism and CT, and the extension of DVE in the U.S. over the past few years. CAG’s SDI instructor/facilitator team of design experts of current and former law enforcement and military special operations backgrounds then guided four design teams through application of the CAG Design Staircase framework. The design teams applied the unique framework, incorporating and employing a variety of design exercises, heuristic aids, and creative approaches to consider legacy and alternative frames/paradigms, a range multiple potential futures, and the varied emergent aspects of the broader complexity of DVE. The teams iterated through divergent-convergent cycles to explore novel concepts—seeking to innovate and discover that which is needed but does not yet exist to provide the organization game-changing advantage against the security threats imposed by DVE.
The engagement concluded successfully with participants providing resounding reviews regarding the impact such a short engagement had on their thinking and in providing new organizational reflection and appreciation concerning complex dynamic security environments that defy traditional legacy approaches for deterrence, enforcement, and prosecution.
