Richard Eisermann, Customer Experience, Service Design and Innovation Executive, California, USA

Citizania (noun): a mental affliction characterised by the conflict between an individual’s legal requirement to declare allegiance to a nation/state and their personal drive for belonging based in borderless religious, ethnic, cultural or even brand constructs.

“Phongsali, Laos, 25 August 2046

“Nguyen had never seen a worse case of citizania until he encountered the Khmu. As head designer for the United Nations Refugee Empowerment Organization, he had been dispatched to Phongsali to help the Khmu (who had been waging a fierce but futile battle for autonomy, against the Laotian government) articulate and assert their ethnic and cultural identities through peaceful means. Nguyen had been thoroughly immersed in Khmu ways and had even conducted several successful co-creation sessions with them, but the Khmu were still resistant. The trauma they had sustained, over centuries of subjugation, had etched their citizania so deeply into their collective psyche that after 6 months of trying, Nguyen could still not come up with a method to address it.”