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). At it’s vaguest, design is less a product and more a common set of cultural and methodological references without qualities (Manzini, 2019). Service designers craft interactions, interaction designers produce graphics, graphic designers write content, and content designers bring to life services they work on. In either case, 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 design approaches 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 across domains and applications (Crilly, 2024). They are creative problem-solving for the service economy, packaged up and ready to be deployed (Gram, 2019; Kimbell, 2019).
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. Developed around four phases — discover, define, develop, deliver — it communicates a distinctive emphasis on exploring problems as a central tenet of generating solutions, improving products and services through user-centric research, and reducing risk through prototyping and iterative learning (Kimbell, 2024).
Framed as the four phases shown in Figure 1, design thinking has been central to the development of design as a contemporary business practice as a way of improving products and services through user-centric research and reducing risk through prototyping and iterative learning (Crilly, 2024). As a memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague practice, design thinking has become creative problem-solving for the service economy – packaged up and ready to be deployed (Gram, 2019).
—
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). Acting as multidisciplinary "islands of experimentation" (Schuurman & Tõnurist, 2017), they have been explicitly designed to overcome a range of barriers that make innovation and cross-cutting coordination difficult within public sector bureaucracies. PSI labs are built on the foundation of design thinking to develop creative policy solutions, emphasise the empowerment of citizens in 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 PSI labs clearly helping drive a more design-oriented approach to public service innovation, 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 programs and services should be delivered — with relatively few reporting that they support the development of policy proposals and reforms represented as steps 1, 2 and 3 below (Lewis et al, 2020).
—
At its broadest, Design is drawing circles, creating "meaningful" and “intuitive” order — placing people, ideas, and things on the inside, while simply describing the complexity of the outside (Papenek, 1971; Lorusso, 2024). But it is also just that, a circle, with our attempts at order inevitably artificial and their outcomes unstable (Lorusso, 2024). At its narrowest, the outcome of design decisions and the activity of designing isn't much clearer. Service designers craft interactions, interaction designers produce graphics, graphic designers write content, and content designers bring to life the services they work on. Design is less a product and more a common set of cultural and methodological references without qualities (Manzini, 2019). This isn't to say that there are no specialists. This is to say that, as a definition, Design is as much about painting a masterpiece as it is about organising your desk drawer — hopelessly abstract and clumsy to define without context (Papanek, 1979; Potter, 1969), an epistemic freedom that has historically been seen as essential to its very nature (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. Design thinking, systems thinking, and entrepreneurial thinking are select examples of design approaches that have been formalised to broaden contemporary organisations repertoire of strategies for addressing the complex and open-ended challenges they are facing in an attempt to innovate and stay competitive (Crilly, 2024; Dorst, 2011).
Each of these approaches have been coveted and promoted for their potential to encourage new perspectives, expand imagination, and boost creativity across domains and applications (Crilly, 2024).
Design thinking in particular, popularised by IDEO in 2008, and the subsequent "double diamond" framework from Design Council (Figure 1) that standardises how the process of design thinking is described, communicate a distinctive design practice with an emphasis on exploring problems as a central tenet to generating solutions (Kimbell, 2024). Under the guise of design thinking, design applies to everything and everyone can do it. Design is no longer hopelessly abstract but creative problem solving for the service economy in a way that is memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details (Gram, 2019).
Design thinking in particular, popularised by IDEO in 2008, and the subsequent "double diamond" framework from Design Council (Figure 1) that standardises how the process of design thinking is described, communicate a distinctive design practice with an emphasis on exploring problems as a central tenet to generating solutions (Kimbell, 2024).
Under the guise of design thinking, design applies to everything and everyone can do it. Design is no longer hopelessly abstract but creative problem solving for the service economy in a way that is memorable, saleable, repeatable, apparently universal, and slightly vague in the details (Gram, 2019).
—INTRODUCTION TO POLICY LABS—