What is our role as designers working to support public design? How do we better prepare ourselves to understand how policy, governance and delivery works? I ask these questions from different perspectives: firstly as a design researcher who has intersected with local government and national policy spheres in my work supporting co-designing with public stakeholders in UK and Southeast Asian contexts. Secondly, as a design educator training the next generations of public designers.
In an earlier post, Catherine Durose highlighted challenges for design in policy on the back of an important report, essentially calling for a ‘more effective, cross-disciplinary evidence base about the use of design expertise in policymaking’. I have no doubt that deepening our collective understanding of design’s role, impact and relationship with policy is key to truly integrating design as part of policymaking. However, what I am particularly interested in and concerned about is how designers in commercial practice or academia are themselves being prepared for a life as public servants. What type of mindset shift is needed to work in the unique, sometimes alien and consistently challenging context of the public sector?
Shift to a public designer mindset
It may sound obvious, but working as a designer in a consultancy setting on commercial projects is a far cry from working in government. Design as a profession was not set up to serve the public, nor work within the logics of local or national governance. As a trained designer, I am aware of certain values, attitudes and qualities that I am particularly comfortable with and am good at. A non-exhaustive list could include:
- We are good at understanding complex situations and contexts
- We are good at convening different experts and disciplines to frame problems and work towards appropriate interventions
- We are good at understanding people and translating their needs and aspirations into accessible and emotionally powerful representations
- We are good at co-designing with stakeholders and involving them in the creative making, development and evaluative processes
- We are good at exploring future ways of being, living and working.
Some things come less naturally however, and there are also some tendencies that makes working in public policy challenging for designers:
- We always want to enact change, and sometimes that means challenging the status quo - but how far are we able to do this within the constraints of public service and systems?
- We lack policy and political literacy - we don’t always understand all the political levers, systems, actors and processes that are involved in delivering a policy and how to navigate through the landscape to deliver the required change.
There are of course other challenges that designers face when transitioning into public sector work, but I wanted to highlight these two in this post to explore questions around readiness and preparation to be a public designer.
The first point, a desire to enact change, is often the reason why many designers (and other public servants) decide to work in the public sector and policy, and is thus important to raise. The second point, the lack of policy and political literacy, is fundamental to address if designers are to develop a long-term career in the public sphere, and to have any significant impact in policy design.
Enact change for citizens
As a design researcher, my motivation to work with the public sector and to engage with policy is to try to ensure that the public's views are considered in the design and delivery of policy. Sometimes this has required challenging the status quo of how policies are delivered, the evidence used to support policies, and even raising fundamental questions around the policy itself. I found it hard to balance the sometimes conflicting interests of the various stakeholders, whether that be the service users, the delivery partners, the local council teams or policymakers. Ultimately the question that I keep coming back to is, ‘who do I serve and who am I responsible for?’
This can sometimes be a tricky question, and depends on the context. You may be a designer embedded in a local team, or brought in externally for a specific programme of work. For example, I was recently brought in to support the co-design of the Holidays Activities and Food Programme for young adults in England. The work was sponsored by local councils and their local service providers. We worked with groups of young people in four regional areas to help create an activity programme that was more suitable to their needs, as current take up by 11-16 years olds was lower compared with the 5-11 year olds. The ideas developed by the young people offered many opportunities to improve (in so doing, challenge) how current provisions are being delivered. At the same time, it was necessary to frame these ideas within the current delivery constraints (systemic, funding, processes, etc) faced by the councils. Gaining an understanding of what these constraints are (some of which are explicit, like funding, some of which are implicit, for example on-going relationships with the local providers) was key to understanding how attractive these alternatives were to the local councils.
Become policy and politically literate
The second point that I want to focus on is the importance of understanding how governments and governance work. Again, this may sound obvious, but formalised design education does not prepare designers for life as a public servant. Understanding how policies are devised, raised, debated, operationalised and evaluated at local and national level is fundamental if designers want to engage with the core aspect of policy designing. However, unless the designer was trained in public policy or has prior experience working in the public sector, it is unlikely that any designer enters prepared with this knowledge.
This is not just a case of learning how policymaking works from a technical perspective but is about the everyday practice of policymaking: context and purpose, understanding the levers of powers and democracy, and the moral and ethical issues relating to the area of work. Knowing how decisions are made, how they can be influenced and who you need to engage with is important in any organisation, and even more so within a policy context should you wish to be effective as a public designer.
My own self-education has come from learning by doing: being thrown into the deep end and having to very quickly learn about the policy landscape, different models of policy making, and the actors and agencies involved, whilst making often naïve assumptions about how things work and who is actually in charge. It helps to understand where you are operating within the policy landscape, who else is involved, which then helps to identify possible next steps and the required agency to bring in change.
Get public designer skills
Training of design skills, methods and mindset is important if we are to embed design as a core skill in government. Conversely, I believe that it is equally important for trained designers looking to enter the policy sphere to understand how policy works in their context.
In my other role as a design educator, I often wonder what I can do to support my students’ political literacy and equip them with the skills to work effectively in the public sector. We currently support this in limited fashion, mainly by offering students time-bound experience through live collaborative briefs and working in partnership with local governments. Examples like UAL’s Public Collaboration Lab have been using this as a successful model for many years. Introducing a public policy module into a design programme or partnering with the Policy Profession to offer an introduction to policy for designers could be one approach, or a far more focused option would be to develop a course on Design for Public Policy from a UK perspective. While it’s encouraging to see design increasingly recognised as a key component of public administration studies (see for e.g. UCL’s Master of Public Administration), it is rare for design programmes to offer equivalent studies in public policy. An interesting example bringing together design and public administration is the dual Masters degree course of Design and Public Administration offered by IIT, Illinois, USA.
You are the change
I want to conclude my reflections by returning to my original question: how do we better prepare designers to work effectively in policymaking? This is not just about gaining new skills or new insights into how policy works, but also shifting how we perceive our roles and identities as designers, and how best we can make an impact. We like to perceive ourselves as ‘agents of change’, but to do so effectively, we need to be politically astute, critical of existing design and policy making practices, and be able to manoeuvre ourselves into positions of influence where we can enact change from within.
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