Over the past decade public design has emerged as a practice for collaboratively creating radical change that shapes public policies and services.
Public design is not a new concept but the scope of public design as a practice is undefined.
This paper argues that government needs a new typology of design. One that creates a distinct difference between commercial design and public design in order to shape public sector capabilities and governance models required to achieve missions/ tackle 21st century problems.
This paper will:
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 complexity around them (Papenek, 1971; 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, 1979; 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 contemporary 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 — promise to encourage new perspectives, expand imagination, and boost creativity (Gram, 2019; Crilly, 2024). They are creative problem-solving for the service economy, packaged up and ready to be deployed (Gram, 2019). Design thinking in particular, popularised by IDEO in 2008 and standardised through the Design Council's "double diamond" framework, communicates a distinctive emphasis on exploring problems as a central tenet of generating solutions (Kimbell et al, 2024).
Figure 1. Design Council, Double Diamond.
Framed as the double diamond shown in Figure 1 (Design Council UK, 20XX), design thinking has been central to the development of design as a contemporary business practice, serving as a way to improve products and services through user-centric research and reduce risk through prototyping and iterative learning (Crilly, 2024). A decade on from the popularisation of design thinking, the "business value of design" is reported to consistently outperform industry-benchmark growth and shareholder returns (McKinsey, 2018) with the ‘design economy’ generating a predicted £71.7 billion in gross value added to the UK economy in 2013 (Design Council UK, 2015).
With an increased focus on public sector innovation and a long-standing view that design should evolve beyond a tool for developing functional 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). Public Sector Innovation (PSI) Labs are one of the most important ways this has been applied within contemporary policy systems (Whicher, 2020; Lewis et al., 2020).
Built on the foundations of design thinking, 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). Their purpose has been to develop creative policy solutions, emphasise more participatory forms of policymaking, and fundamentally change the way public problems are perceived (Lewis et al., 2020; Mintrom & Luetjens, 2016; Sørensen & Torfing, 2015).
Despite their popularity, however, PSI labs have remained separate from policymaking. Instead (as illustrated in figure 2), they typically focus downstream on process and service innovation projects, using design thinking to improve citizen experiences of public services (Mintrom and Luetjens, 2016) — without necessarily involving citizens in deciding what, how, or whether something should be delivered in the first place (Lewis et al, 2020).