Public design is the application of design principles, tools and approaches in pursuit of better government or improved policy outcomes. It includes the use of specialist skills and expertise in things like app design, but also more generalised skills to understand and design systems, strategies and policies.
“All of the things that a citizen interacts with that government has produced have been designed,” explains Lucy Kimbell, professor of contemporary design practices at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London.
These touchpoints might look like anything from a paper form you fill in at a hospital, to your ability to navigate round a school building, to the creation of a policy itself or the organisation that delivers it. For some of these interactions, there’s an understanding that professional designers are needed – to create an app or a website, for example. But over the last two decades, there has been an increasing understanding that design tools and skills can be brought to bear in a much wider way.
Kimbell describes public design as sitting between two definitions of design. “On the one hand, it’s a specialist expertise and activity associated with some people who went to design school,” she says. “On the other, it’s a generalised capability guiding how you respond to an issue and develop a new or improved product, service or process.”
The benefits of public design are now being recognised globally. Kimbell says that while the UK “is a leader and has critical mass in this”, there are numerous other examples in governments across the world – from the EU, the Netherlands and Ireland through to Australia, New Zealand and even the US federal government, which set up a design team last summer. Last summer also saw the publication of the Public Design Evidence Review, a package of eight reports prepared by the Department for Work and Pensions’ Human Centred Design Science team and supported by a range of academics, including Kimbell as well as practitioners across the UK public sector.
The PDER explores the role and value of design in the public sector through a range of academic documents, case studies and in-depth interviews. It describes public design as an iterative process of clarifying problems, exploring options and testing what works using practical, creative and collaborative methods grounded in how people actually experience public services and systems.
Why is it important?
The PDER suggests that public design can offer an answer to a fundamental question civil servants face: “How do we create better public policies and services that routinely achieve their intent?”
By starting with the lived experience of citizens and offering tools to bring together perspectives and skills from across professional and organisational boundaries, a public design approach increases the chances of ending up with an accessible, inclusive and effective service. It provides a range of methods that could support thinking and collective decision-making in government – the formal name is “psychotechnologies” – by both expanding the data that is available to support a decision and broadening the range of “frames” that people use to understand the data.
Public design also plays a key role in delivering value for money as well as public value. Since the most expensive time to find out a policy doesn’t work is after implementation, an emphasis on smaller-scale prototyping, testing and learning means public design can reduce the risk of costly, large-scale failures. When embedded into the live running of a policy or service, an iterative approach can improve its resilience, supporting it to adapt to a changing social, political and technological context through the use of feedback loops.
All of this means government can be more agile, evidence-based and accountable as it tackles complex problems: embedding learning and adaptation into a process means you can adapt as needed while following what works. However, Kimbell offers two additional thoughts on the importance of public design, pointing first to its potential to address the democratic deficit that arises when citizens’ experiences of government or institutions fall short of their expectations. “Having people’s lived experience made visible and connected to the design of things, as well as outcomes, offers a way of addressing some of those democratic challenges,” she says.
How to use a public design approach
- Start with real problems, not assumptions. Using design techniques to analyse people’s lived experience, combine this with other information and enable exploration and (re)framing of issues in ways that allow for deeper and systemic understandings
- Use iterative methods to de-risk decisions. Testing in context, learning and adapting reduces the risk of costly mistakes and creates effective, evidence-based services
- Work across boundaries – professional and organisational – to build really multidisciplinary teams focused on a shared problem
- Reflect on your accountability and governance structures to allow for methods such as rapid prototyping, collaborative co-design and sense-making that often cut across or challenge established ways of thinking and working
She also notes that while design does offer a practical, inclusive approach to solving specific problems, it also offers tools for “creativity and visioning, imagining and co-creating [ideas] which might go beyond current frames of reference, current ways of thinking about an issue.”
This more expansive aspect of design practice could help governments to grip some “huge, systemic challenges” facing the world, such as the ecological crisis. Since these challenges are “tied to the design of systems”, a design lens can help governments to think effectively about how to rebuild systems in a more sustainable way.
What does this mean for my daily work?
The PDER identifies seven characteristic design practices that typify how design is done in public contexts – from understanding people’s experiences and synthesising ideas to prototyping and experimenting with options.
For those interested in adopting design practices, Kimbell suggests civil servants start with a question: “Who or what is consciously designing an intervention?” (The “what” is there to take account of the fact that, these days, it might be AI). Then, Kimbell says, officials should ask themselves: “To what extent are lived experience, analysis of a wider system, and iteration built into designing that intervention?” And if those things are not present, then the public design framing can help you get to where you need to be.
While these questions might be more relevant to an official working on a new policy or addressing a change requirement, even those working on an ongoing service or policy could find value in a design approach. They might do this by considering if a feedback loop could be added to the system, or what would happen if their core assumptions about a policy were to change in the future. Or you could also start with thinking about design in your own team, for example by designing the way team meetings work to ensure they are focused on user needs; or making time to really think deeply about problems you’re facing, and build hypotheses and ways to test them.
Public design tools and approaches alone may improve outcomes but will not always be sufficient to make a significant difference. As Susan Acland-Hood, head of the policy profession, wrote in her foreword to the PDER, “design is not a silver bullet”. “It works best when supported by the right conditions: leadership that values experimentation, teams with the time and space to understand problems deeply and accountability systems that allow for learning and adaptation,” she wrote.
In the PDER’s brief guide, DWP’s Human-Centred Design Science team notes that “design can help the public sector think better together and act with greater empathy, precision and impact, but doing it well takes considerable work. Design doesn’t make things easy, it makes things possible.”
Further resources:
Public Design Evidence Review
Public Design Beyond Central Government
Design Council
The Office of Public Sector Innovation’s toolkit navigator
Government Digital Service’s Service Design Manual
Policy Design Community