EL PRESUPUESTO DE INGRESOS

The public and civic sectors are a major site for design activity, which has been growing steadily as an innovation approach for nearly two decades in many places around the world (Ansell &

Torfing, 2014, p. 2: Bason, 2014, p. 3: Clarke & Craft, 2019, p. 5: Miettinen & Valtonen, 2013;

Mulgan, 2014, p. 1: Service Design Network & Mager, 2016, p. 9).

Public and civic sector innovation around the world

Design activity in the public and civic sectors sits within a broader movement of public sector innovation, which has been growing since the early 1970s and relates to “new ideas that create value for society” (Bason, 2010, p.4). The desire to create public value has been a key motivator for public innovation - where public value is understood as factors that improve internal operations such as “higher productivity, improved service quality, enhanced capacity for problem-solving” (Ansell & Torfing, 2014, p. 6), as well as societal outcomes or values such as

“reduced crime, educational attainment and... democracy, equality, and trust, legitimacy, and confidence in the government” (van der Bijl-Brouwer, p.2). In their analysis of the role of design within public innovation, Ansell and Torfing (2014) note that there are rival views on how to

stimulate public innovation, including “privatisation” which involves commercialising and contracting out public services, and initiatives to “reinvigorate public bureaucracy” from the inside (p.3). Arguably the majority of design-led innovation activity has focused on the latter.

However, the public and civic sectors have typically lagged behind the private sector in keeping pace with innovation, for example by failing to capitalise on the broader ‘digital transformation’

which has revolutionised other fields (Clarke, 2017). However, there is a significant interest in public innovation at different levels of government including “national and trans-national policy-making, regional planning and development, and local regulation and service delivery” (OECD, 2010). Over the past decade, design activity has been interwoven with broader public sector innovation which is resulting in “a new emerging practice in which design approaches are used to design and implement public services, products, policies and procedures across domains such as housing, employment, health, crime prevention, and education” (van der Bijl-Brouwer, p.2). This design activity is also closely linked to the growth of public sector innovation labs, ‘i-labs’, which have been established in many bureaucracies as ways to deliver innovation and, although heterogeneous in approach, many i-labs draw heavily on design (Tõnurist et al., 2007, p.1465). Thus, the emergence of design can be seen as one of a number of elements in an ongoing and widespread innovation and reform movement.

Design activity in the public and civic sectors is now an international movement, however there have been different national trajectories. Denmark and other Scandinavian countries are commonly thought to be at the forefront of this movement, where the organisations Mindlab³¹ and the Helsinki Design Lab³² were frontrunners. In the UK this design activity has grown rapidly since the early 2000s, initially driven by consultancies such as LiveWork³³, Engine³⁴, Participle³⁵, and Think Public³⁶, before becoming an established sector with many teams working inside and outside bureaucracies. There is also an established field in the Asia-Pacific region, for example in the Singapore Ministry of Manpower³⁷ (Bason, 2013, p.16). There are

31 MindLab was one of the first internal to government, public sector innovation labs in the world, and was founded in Denmark in 2002.

32 Helsinki Design Lab was established by the Finnish government’s innovation agency SITRA; it ran from 2008 to 2013.

33 LiveWork is a commercial service design agency founded in London in 2002.

34 Engine is a commercial service design agency founded in London in 2002.

35 Participle was a service design agency focused on redesigning the welfare state, which closed in 2015.

36 Think Public was the first social design agency in the UK, established in 2004

37 The Singapore Ministry of Manpower is a department of the Singapore government using design.

long standing-innovation teams in many other places, Mexico City for example hosted the Laboratorio para la Ciudad³⁸ from 2013-2018. Additionally, some of the earliest public sector design activity took place in the Australian Taxation Office³⁹ (Body, 2008). Despite its advanced design sector and education system the United States has lagged behind, although organisations such as the Public Policy Lab⁴⁰ in New York have been operating for nearly a decade and a wider field is now developing (Buchanan, C. et al., 2019, p.167). These initiatives represent only a handful of the organisations undertaking design activity in public and civic sector contexts.

There are common motivations for public and civic sector organisations to engage with innovation and design activity. In recent years, contextual factors such as the global economic crisis and fiscal austerity have created pressure on public organisations to deliver services more efficiently (Tõnurist et al., 2007, p.1461). In turn, organisations beyond the public sector - in the civic sectors - have had to fill gaps in public service provision. Within public administrations there is also growing recognition that complex problems cannot be addressed through conventional structures and design approaches are sought to infuse different ways of working and thinking into these systems, resulting in a call for new forms of design leadership and management (Junginger 2017, p.291: Mulgan 2014, p.1). The relationship between government and citizens has also changed fundamentally and the desire to understand the needs and demands of citizens has been another major driver of public sector innovation (Service Design Network & Mager 2016, p.11: Ansell & Torfing 2014, p.2). Design has moved into this space because of its perceived potential to “deal with the critical question of how to bring together various actors in an open-ended and cross-disciplinary search for new and creative solutions”

(Ansell & Torfing 2014, p. 3). In one of the few studies of non-profit organisations, the clear focus on the consumer was found to be an effective means of building awareness and appetite for design activity (Nusem 2019, p.45). In addition, the digital government agenda has been a major catalyst for design work in the public and civic sectors and has profoundly shaped the development of service design (Bason, 2013, p.16: Sangiorgi & Prendiville, 2017, p.9).

38 The Laboratorio para la Ciudad was an internal government innovation lab run by the Mexico City government from 2013-2018.

39 The Australian Taxation Office was one of the first government departments in the world to use design.

40The Public Policy Lab was founded in 2011 in New York, as the first public sector design non-profit in the USA.

Design activity is also being applied in different places within public and civic organisations;

including the ‘front-end’ of services through service design and digital design; new service models; and introducing new approaches to engender cultural change in organisations, frequently through capacity building and training (Christiansen, 2015: Sangiorgi & Prendiville, 2017, p.20: Service Design Network & Mager, 2016, p.13). Latterly, there has been increasing engagement in strategic areas of public and civic organisations, such as the design of policy, governance and legislation (Sangiorgi & Prendiville, 2017, p.20). The deployment of design in strategic contexts is a newer and less understood aspect of design activity, where this research focuses in order to add to knowledge.

Defining public and civic sector design activity

Different terms and definitions are used in the literature to describe public and civic sector design activity. Whilst public sector design is a now coherent field of academic study, the concept of civic-sector design - design initiatives outside the public sector - which nonetheless relate to the creation of public value (Buchanan et al., 2019) - has received less focus, although aspects such as the subfield of social design are well-documented. This is perhaps because organisations in the civic sectors such as foundations and charities have been slower to adopt design activity than the public sector, or because this activity is more diffuse which makes analysis harder. This research examines public and civic sector design together, in acknowledgement of the diverse actors that are advancing design activity in social contexts.

Service design has been the dominant focus of research and is now well established. Although it is defined variously, there is common agreement that service design focuses on reshaping citizen interactions with government services and other points of interface, including digital and physical interactions. Leading service design academics, Sangiorgi and Prendiville (2017), define service design as “a human-centred, creative and iterative approach to service innovation” (p.2). They argue that the service design field began as an object of theoretical debate in the 1990s before developing as a practical design discipline with the first service design studios opening in London in the early 2000s (p.1). Within the public and civic sectors, service design has emerged as a distinct and well-formulated field.

Broader terms, particularly ‘design thinking’ are also used to denote design activity in the public and civic sectors. This term was originally used in business contexts to refer to the “qualitatively different thought processes, and approach to problem-solving, that comes from having had a

design training and career” (Design Commission, 2013). Although design thinking has been adopted in public sector contexts by some observers, it is also critiqued for its associations with a commodified form of design activity and the emphasis implied on developing ideas rather than delivery. In addition, there are overlapping areas relating to the practice and research of public and civic sector design activity. Design for social innovation refers to socially-motivated design activity which often, although not exclusively, takes place outside business and consumer contexts. According to Irwin (2015), this evolving discipline “expands problem contexts and objectives to address problems in social, cultural, and economic domains”, (p.230).

Other theorists emphasise the participatory aspect of public and civic sector design activity and argue that the ‘design for participation’ field has been catalysed by emerging expectations of greater citizen engagement in government processes. Staszowski et.al. (2014) define designing for participation as “an approach that seeks to re-imagine public policies and current service delivery in public agencies by transforming the relationships between designers, civil servants, and citizens and ultimately by making the process of public service design more inclusive” (p.2).

In the context of the non-profit sector “the role of design remains ill-defined” (Nusem et.al., 2019, p.1), which is also the case for design activity in foundations and charities and other socially-motivated organisations. Thus, a range of terms and definitions are used to denote design activity focused on improving strategies, processes, services and citizen experiences in the public and civic sectors.

Methods and working processes in public and civic sector design

Despite the considerable diversity in definitions there is broad consensus in the literature about the approaches and methods deployed in public and civic sector design, and the argument that whilst some features of new design activity stem from established design industries like product and industrial design it has expanded to an amalgam of approaches from other disciplines (Clarke & Craft, 2019, p. 8: Manzini, 2015, p. 68; Mulgan, 2014, p.1). This design activity is now typically rooted in ethnographic or user research which aims to understand the daily experience of government staff and members of the public who rely on the services they deliver. Evidence generated from design research is then used as the basis to inform changes to public services and policies or to build new ones. Working visually with material artefacts such as ‘journey maps’ or ‘prototypes’ and testing ideas iteratively before implementation is also significant (Buchanan, C., et al., 2019, p.163). Much emphasis has also been placed on training public servants in design approaches, and building individual and leadership capabilities is now a

considerable part of public and civic sector design activity (OECD, 2015, p.15). Ansell and Torfing (2014) provide a succinct description arguing that “design thinking operates through iterative rounds of inspiration, ideation, selection and implementation, and it combines a large array of tools and methods to guide and sustain the design of new and better solutions” (p.4).

Although there is overlap in descriptions of the technical working processes of designers engaged in public and civic sector activity, the mindset required to undertake this design practice is also underlined and “designers’ work is recognised more as an approach to innovation than a set of tools” (Sangiorgi & Prendiville, 2017, p.8). Public sector design activity has therefore become a “growing suite of design logics, traditions, and practices that are currently being applied to matters of governance” (Clarke & Craft, 2019, p. 6). This argument can also be extended to the civic sectors although literature about these fields is less developed.

Weaknesses and limitations

There are critiques in the literature about public and civic sector design. One of the most glaring challenges to the field has been its weakness in measuring impact and creating evidence of results (Mulgan, 2014, p.1: Prendiville & Sangiorgi, 2017, p.7). As Kimball argues (2016) in her review of the book Design for Policy (2014), there is relatively little in “definitive, quantitative proof” that evidences the tangible impact of design activity in public and private organisations (p.275). This has placed design activity at odds with the rational, quantitative stance of some public and civic sector organisations and left the sector open to critique. Clarity about the origins of public sector design activity is another area of challenge relating to its legitimacy in the public and civic sectors. As Mulgan (2014) comments “The advocates of design methods have been unclear about whether they are primarily promoting methods derived from product design...or whether they are echoing the ideas promoted by Herbert Simon and others a generation ago that see all public service as involving aspects of design: policy design, organisational design, service design, and role design” (p.1).

A more complex debate within the literature relates to the political intentions of practitioners of public and civic sector design activity. In such a global movement, the political and ethical stances of practitioners will necessarily vary widely. However, some literature argues that there is a unifying cause in public sector design activity, particularly around the representation of different, often vulnerable, groups inside large bureaucracies (Buchanan, C. et.al. 2019). Design

activity in bureaucracies has been complicit with existing policy mandates and political orientations and, as Staszowski et al. (2014) argue, “despite the inclusion of multiple stakeholders in the design process, decision-making for creating services and policies ultimately lies within the public agency and is bound by policy mandates and political decisions” (p.1).

However, the political and ethical decisions behind public and civic sector design work, and the realities of where decision-making power lies, are not usually made explicit by practitioners. The ethical dimensions and challenges for designers in new and more political contexts is an area of concern for this research.

There are also structural challenges with the current public and civic sector design field identified in the literature. The presence of authorising environments, for example through leadership support, has been crucial to the rise of public and civic sector design but there is still a fundamental challenge in embedding these approaches in public and civic sector contexts (Sangiorgi and Prendiville, 2017, p.7). In addition, there are structural challenges within the design sector. According to Bason (2013) the market for consultancy services is currently immature or even declining in some places, and design education has failed to meet the demands for service and system designers who can interact effectively with governments (p.17). In addition, there are critiques in public sector innovation more broadly, relating to a perceived failure to move beyond the “low hanging fruit” (Ansell and Torfing, 2014. p.11) and, as Bason (2010) comments, deeper change through innovation requires structural and institutional support which has only marginally taken place, and “In order to make such ‘paradigmatic’

innovation much more likely, leaders in government must build an infrastructure of innovation – a public sector innovation ecosystem” (p.5). The need for organisation-wide change is also identified by Nusem et al. (2019) in a study of non-profit sector design activity, where to foster design capability “requires an organisational shift from reliance on a handful of key advocates for design” (p.72).

Thus, design activity in the public and civic sectors emerges as a broad practice with multiple definitions and applications, and although there is coalescence in descriptions of the design process and in the collaborative nature of this activity, its current heterogeneity is also underlined in the literature. The strategic and political or ethical dimensions of public and civic sector design activity are underexplored at present. Thus, the recent claims of design as a tool to aid strategy development and policymaking require urgent attention. Whilst the literature highlights that design activity in strategic contexts is growing in these fields, explorations in

applied contexts that show how this work is taking place are lacking. This research therefore seeks to contribute to understanding of these new applications for design activity.