Over the past decade, as governments have faced increasingly interconnected, systemic and 'wicked' 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 positive impact on policymaking.
Instead, among the waterfall-style programmes that dominate public programme management, service design has been wrestled downstream—leveraged for process and service innovation projects that focus on improving citizen experiences of digital public services, without necessarily involving citizens in the decision-making or design of them in the first place.
By carrying out a gap analysis between a set of practices associated with public design—synthesised as part of the UK's public design review—and the UK's Digital and Data Capability framework, this research argues that there is an inherent lack of "public-ness" in how service design has been institutionalised in government, resulting in a "public design gap". In other words, service design as a practice lacks the sophisticated political literacy and grasp of systemic complexities needed to address contentious policymaking activities.
To close this gap, we need to move beyond service design and towards public design—an expanded set of experimental, future-facing practices capable of engaging with the inherently political, uncertain, and contested nature of policymaking.
To mobilise service design as a tool centred on creating public value for policy development, there is a clear need to distinguish public design from other approaches — moving beyond improving the delivery of public services to a full suite of practices that generate public value through desirable policy outcomes. After all, design is about making things better. Where its strength in opening up possibilities has typically been perceived as a weakness within the constraints and realities of policymaking, the definition and scope of public design will need to rest on a different mindset: a belief that government should be humble about its ability to know how policy will work in practice when working in complex systems.
This starts by differentiating public design from "just good policymaking" — where design practices often appear in isolation — towards bringing all public design practices under one banner. A banner that understands how they can be applied throughout the end-to-end policy cycle to drive equitable, participatory, and creative policymaking.
This involves activating new categories of public designers that look beyond the limitations of service design. Categories such as policy designers who can blend the machinery of government with participatory forms of citizen engagement; public service designers who can act as the glue between policy and delivery teams; green designers with an explicit focus on regenerative design; and mission designers who are able to construct new forms of human-centred governance that will be the foundations of any succesful mission-orientated approach.