Design is notoriously hard to define. At its simplest, it’s creating “meaningful" and “intuitive” order — placing people, ideas, and things on the inside of a circle while describing the complexity on the outside (Papenek, 1971; Lorusso, 2024). 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 predominantly through the professionalisation of a range of disciplinary approaches to innovation management (Bason, 2017). Design thinking, systems thinking, and entrepreneurial thinking are just a few that have been 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 (Crilly, 2024). Design thinking, in particular — popularised by IDEO in 2008 and standardised through the Design Council's "double diamond" framework (Figure 1) — has been central to these developments and a significant influence on embedding design in contemporary business practice, with the "business value of design" recognised as enabling companies to outperform industry benchmark growth by two to one (McKinsey, 2018).
Figure 1. Design Council, Double Diamond.
Developed around four phases — discover, define, develop, deliver — the double diamond communicates a distinctive emphasis on exploring problems as a central tenet of generating solutions (Kimbell, 2024). In essence, it is creative problem-solving for the service economy, packaged up in four steps and ready to be deployed to improve products and services through user-centric research, and reduce risk through prototyping and iterative learning (Gram, 2019; Kimbell, 2019; Kimbell, 2024).
With an increased focus on public sector innovation and a long-standing view that design should evolve beyond a tool for the development of functional consumer products into a process for the collaborative development of '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; Bason, 2013; Design Council (UK), 2013; Kimbell, 2016; Blomkamp, 2018). This is widely referred to as "design for policy" (Bason, 2014).
Public Sector Innovation (PSI) Labs are one of the most important ways in which design for policy has been applied within policy systems (Whicher, 2020; Lewis et al., 2020). Built on the foundations of design thinking, they act as multidisciplinary "islands of experimentation" (Schuurman & Tõnurist, 2017) which have been explicitly designed to overcome a range of 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 — often preventing policymakers from solving the "wrong" problems in the first place (Lewis et al., 2020; Mintrom & Luetjens, 2016; Sørensen & Torfing, 2015)
Despite their popularity, however, there has been little evidence that suggests PSI labs and their use of design thinking have had a significant impact on policymaking in the public sector (Clarke and Craft, 2018; Lewis et al, 2020). As illustrated in Figure 2, rather than being integrated into institutions, they have remained separate, focusing downstream on improving citizen experiences of public digital services — without necessarily involving citizens in deciding what, how, or whether something should be delivered in Steps 1, 2, and 3 below (Lewis et al, 2020).
Figure 2. Waterfall-style policymaking starts with many risky assumptions. Edited to demonstrate PSI learning loops happening after key decisions, downstream.
Although this “front-end focus” has been valuable for improving the administration of public digital services, it has failed to make a case for the core value of design in addressing genuinely meaningful, genuinely knotty problems (Hill, 2012). Fundamentally, design thinking — a concept inherently rooted in commercial innovation management — has remained divorced from public institutional ways of doing as it lacks the sophisticated political literacy and due consideration of systemic complexity and power dynamics required to address politically contentious policymaking activities in practice (Peters, 2018; Camacho, 2019; Conway et al., 2018; Clarke and Craft, 2018).