Over the past decade, as governments have faced increasingly interconnected, systemic challenges, service design has emerged as an approach for collaboratively creating radical change through public sector innovation. However, despite a relatively large degree of success in improving the quality of digital public services, there is very little evidence that service design has had a significant impact on policymaking itself (Lewis et al., 2020). This paper argues that an inherent lack of "public-ness" in how service design has been institutionalised in government has created a public design gap and that, in order to mobile design as a tool for policy development, we need to develop a suite of public design practices that create future-facing, bottom-up, experimental capabilities to address genuinely meaningful, genuinely knotty problems in policymaking.
(1.1) Contemporary design as a commercial practice
Design is notoriously hard to define. At its simplest, it's creating "meaningful" and "intuitive" order — understanding the relationships between people, ideas and things while describing the uncertainty around them (Papenek, 1984; Lorusso, 2024). At its broadest, it is as much painting a masterpiece as it is organising your desk drawer — hopelessly abstract and clumsy to define without context, an epistemic freedom that has historically been seen as essential to its very nature (Papanek, 1984; Potter, 1969; Gram, 2019).
Contemporary design discourse, on the other hand, can be understood through the professionalisation of a range of disciplinary approaches to innovation management, formalised to broaden organisations' repertoire of strategies for addressing complex and open-ended challenges (Crilly, 2024; Dorst, 2011). Each of these approaches — memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details — promises to encourage new perspectives, expand imagination, and boost creativity (Gram, 2019; Crilly, 2024). Design thinking in particular, originating from industrial and product design (Manzini, 2015) before being popularised by IDEO in 2008 and standardised through the UK Design Council's "double diamond" framework, emphasises problem exploration as a central tenet of generating solutions (Kimbell et al., 2024).
Framed as the double diamond shown in Figure 1 (Design Council, 2025), design thinking can best be understood as a way for organisations to improve products and services through user-centric research and reduce risk through prototyping and iterative learning (Crilly, 2024). Design thinking has been central to the development of design as a contemporary commercial practice, becoming "creative problem-solving for the service economy" (Gram, 2019), with the "business value of design" now being recognised to outperform industry-benchmark growth and shareholder returns (McKinsey, 2018), and the 'design economy' in the UK contributing billions to the economy every year (Design Council, 2015).
Figure 1. Double Diamond (Design Council, 2025).
(1.2) Service design as a public panacea
With an increased focus on public sector innovation and a long-standing view that design should evolve beyond a tool for developing consumer products into a process for collaboratively creating "radical change" (Bjögvinsson et al., 2012), governments, too, have looked to use design-led approaches as a way of framing, ideating, and generating solutions for complex policy problems (Lewis et al., 2020). Alongside the emergence of government digital units like the UK's Government Digital Service (GDS) that adapted "user-centred" design approaches from industry to improve public services (Kimbell et al, 2024), Public Sector Innovation (PSI) labs are one of the most important ways design has been applied within contemporary policy systems (Whicher, 2021; Lewis, 2025).
Built on the foundations of design thinking (Lee and Ma, 2020), PSI labs act as multidisciplinary "islands of experimentation" (Schuurman & Tõnurist, 2017), explicitly designed to overcome barriers that make innovation and coordination difficult within public sector bureaucracies (Lewis et al, 2020). Although there is no single set of methods that labs use (Lewis, 2025), design is central to their function in offering user-centred, flexible, and creative approaches to policy, participatory forms of policymaking, and in fundamentally changing the way public problems are perceived by policymakers (Lewis et al, 2020; Mintrom & Luetjens, 2016; Sørensen & Torfing, 2015).
Service design, in particular, has been widely accepted as the key design discipline within PSI labs. Based on the role of design in organising production and consumption in industry (Kimbell, 2009), service design focuses on connecting experiences, processes, relationships, and systems to gather insights, generate ideas, test these ideas, and then develop solutions that create new value for people and organisations (Bason, 2018). As a profession in government, service design was adopted through the creation and professionalisation of digital, data, and technology (DDaT) career paths in the civil service by GDS in 2011. In the development of these professions, GDS mixed ideas and ways of working from commercial practices and agile software development to reshape how the UK government procured, developed, and delivered digital public services. Since then, service design has been used as a “panacea” within the public sector (Hou, 2024) for both improving the quality of public services (Bason and Schneider, 2014) and as an approach to policymaking (Bason, 2018).
(2.1) Illustrating the public design gap
Despite a relatively large degree of success in improving the quality of digital public services, there is very little evidence that design has had a significant impact on high-level policy development (Lewis et al., 2020). Instead, as illustrated in Figure 2, a public design gap has emerged where service design is deployed downstream for process and service innovation projects — focusing on improving citizen experiences of public services (Mintrom and Luetjens, 2016) without necessarily involving citizens in significant policy decisions in the first place (Lewis et al., 2020). What this disconnect between design and policymaking means in the policy cycle is that service design, as a capability that explicitly reduces risk through iterative learning, is not used to test assumptions before decisions are made in the policymaking process, which can lead to significant public costs and negative citizen impacts (Greenway and Loosemore, 2024).
Figure 2. Edited version of Waterfall-style programmes start with many risky assumptions by A. Greenway and T. Loosemore (2024), from Public Digital (https://d1rnadml6vbx0i.cloudfront.net/Public-Digital_The-Radical-How.pdf). Edited by J. Strachan.
This downstream focus is often attributed to labs' small size and autonomy, which "limits their ability to catalyse and push through public sector-wide changes" (Tõnurist et al., 2017). Jenny Lewis, however, argues that whether they are large or small, labs' use of design encounters resistance the more policy-driven their activities are (Lewis, 2020; Lewis et al., 2020), and this is because when confronting systemic challenges and complex power dynamics between the public, market, and state, the vocabulary and practice of design starts to crumble (Chen et al, 2016; Lewis et al, 2020). In other words, service design as a practice — one that is inherently rooted in commercial innovation management and has been adopted by government — lacks the sophisticated political literacy and grasp of systemic complexities needed to address contentious policymaking activities (Camacho, 2019; Conway et al., 2018; Clarke & Craft, 2018).
(2.2) Differentiating the outcomes and practice of commercial and public service design
In many cases, the outcomes, value, and processes associated with service design — generating, visualising, materialising, synthesising, exploring, experimenting with, and involving participants — all serve as a way to improve decision-making, deliver services, reduce risk, and reach shared strategic goals in both commercial and public contexts (Crilly, 2024; Conway et al., 2024). The key difference, however, is that while businesses are inherently concerned with directing these outcomes toward increasing shareholder value, market share, and brand identification (Conway et al., 2024), public design practice is oriented toward the creation of public value "as both an outcome and a process" (Mazzucato and Ryan-Collins, 2022). This involves designing in unavoidably political contexts to create collaboration across systems, stakeholder and citizen engagement, reduced innovation risk, and legitimising initiatives within longer-term political and socio-technological goals (Kimbell et al., 2024).
These different outcomes of commercial and public service design mean that their specific practices – the inputs, outputs, and skills to achieve them – are fundamentally different. Commercial service designers, for example, prioritise innovation and service improvements (Conway et al, 2024) by focusing on customer needs, technological efficiency, regulatory compliance, and shareholder demands. They create customer-centric, cost-efficient solutions within competitive and regulated environments to maximise profitability and minimise risk – a profit-driven approach that often leads to "enshitification" at the expense of user value in the long term. In contrast, public service design prioritises the stewardship of systems and services in highly interconnected and complex policy situations (Conway et al., 2024), which involve agenda setting, research and policy design, programme and service design, operational delivery, monitoring and evaluation, and policy maintenance, succession, or termination (Kimbell et al., 2024). Put simply, public service design diversifies sources of information, knowledge, creativity, and learning across the policy cycle to not only create well-designed, customer-oriented services that maximise operational efficiency and shape the regulatory frameworks that govern commercial actors, but also work within and across multiple sets of systems to steer commercial activities toward longer-term public outcomes.