Notes

awful scribble

REDRAFT of section 1

20/03/25

Defining public design beyond the scope of commercial outcomes

Public design: a new typology for government (OLD VERSION)

This paper begins by examining the evolution of contemporary design as a commercial practice and how service design has manifested as a panacea within government. It then illustrates the public design gap by distinguishing the outcomes of commercial and public design practices to frame a gap analysis between the UK's Government Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework and public design practices that have been synthesised as part of the UK's public design review. This paper concludes by arguing that to mobilise design as a tool for policy development, the UK government needs to move beyond service design and towards a definition for public design that activates new categories of designers, aligns capabilities, and creates new forms governance.

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This paper will:

• Give an overview of how contemporary design has evolved as a commercial practice, itsuse in the public sector through Public Sector Innovation (PSI) labs, and how it has manifested as service design in government.
• Identify and discuss the ‘Public Design gap’; how service design has failed to have an impact beyond service and process innovation because it is still predominantly understood as a commercial discipline, lacking ‘public-ness’… demonstrate this with a gap analysis between the UK DDAT for service design and (proposed) public design practices in the public design review
• Create the case for Public Design; the need to define it’s scope of practice under one umbrella (importance of a definition) and what this means for aligning the capabilities and governance needed to manage it (i.e. which new professions it could activate and what this could mean for concepts like ‘mission-architecture’)
• (Extra: what design can’t do) Evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of my argument: describe why this has (or has no) implications for the effectiveness, operationalisation and accountabilities of public outcomes

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Commercial outcomes (A) require service design to focus on creating a well-designed, customer-centric service that minimises operational costs in a competitive and highly regulated sector. Public outcomes (B), on the other hand, orient service design to both design the public services that enable commercial actors to operate and to shape the regulatory environment in which they operate. While this also involves well-designed, customer-centric services that ideally minimize operational costs, these services need to maximize provisions and direct the behavior of commercial actors within regulation. As an extension, public service design is required to interface across broader public policy to shape the behaviors of these actors within and across systems towards creating public value, such as housing affordability, fair business conditions, and inclusive financial access.

—downstream focus is labs but really it is because…—

This downstream focus is often attributed to their small size and autonomy, which "limits their ability to catalyse and push through public sector-wide changes" (Tõnurist et al, 2017). Jenny Lewis argues, however, that whether they are large or small, internal or external, labs' use of design runs up against existing public structures, and the more policy-driven their activities are, the more resistance they encounter both inside and outside the public sector (Lewis, 2020; Lewis et al, 2020).