In the qualitative interviews, many of the experts clearly viewed making and working in a material way as core design attributes. In several interviews, the experts made connections between the material aspects of their design activity, such as image making or drawing, and the culture of design itself. One expert practitioner described how they sought to alter physical environments in order to create the conditions for change. In this case, simple material artefacts were being used to prime an organisation for further design work and to establish the presence of design.
“If we are talking to young people - what is their visual culture? That element, if you start losing it because you are so ‘design thinky’, you stop worrying about those core things of design...all this bullshit of design thinking and these ugly slides without any respect for fonts or colours.” (INT 8)
“When we used to work in government we would pay attention to the paper we used, to how the invitation was designed, to how the meeting was planned, to what the follow up was. Because these are all expressions of the new culture and what better way to express it than through the materiality of it as opposed to the theory of it. The more you
can get it in the material world the more likely you are to have people experience something new. When people experience something new, you can change the terms of the debate.” (INT 14)
The primary data also provides evidence about points of friction between the culture of designers and the new strategic spaces where design activity is now taking place. The notion of a cultural mismatch between the tangible world of designers and the analytical world of policymakers or strategists was cited in the qualitative interviews. One of the expert practitioners explicitly framed the cultural differences between the worldview of designers and policymakers in relation to the difficulties designers experience in understanding the ‘material’ of policymaking, suggesting that designers with specific training such as product design can encounter barriers in knowing what to build and how to build it in more strategic contexts.
“I think some of the limitations that designers have are in understanding what the material is, so to speak, in the public sector. For an architect it's very clear. Its building materials, systems, electrical, these kinds of things. The material one needs to shape in the public sector is different and understanding requires experience…in the public sector context, understanding what the material is - which is policy, economics etc…” (INT 14)
Cultural challenges relating to materiality and making in design were also evident in the online survey. One respondent identified a range of cultural barriers in response to a survey question about the current weaknesses of public and civic sector design. In their response, the prototyping process of designers was identified as a specific barrier and the respondent clearly saw this as a blocker to the exploratory and iterative aspects of design activity.
“Simply put, government is not designed around the principles of design, it is designed for order and stability. Deep unbiased research does not really exist, as most government officials are originating an action around a pre-decided policy mandate from elected politicians, so the ‘open end’ to the problem resolution is not always there. In addition, the notion of synthesis does not exist, as the time devoted to this critical design element is not deemed valuable. Government is built around a ‘once-right-perfect’ mentality, so the idea of a prototype seems wasteful…” (SQ 34)
Barriers to working materially were also evident in the social investment case study, both practical and cultural. The project was the first time prototyping had been used in the UK social investment sector. The funders and investors who were involved in the prototyping work had
limited time and were initially unclear about the commitment that would be required of them; the design team found that prototyping was not a “natural” process (The Point People & Snook, 2015, p.24). Other insights from the prototyping process were cultural. The designers found they had to switch between roles as external facilitators and members of project teams to move the work forward, and observed that prototyping would have been easier if it had been done by a “neutral party” (p.24). In their project report the design team observed that the expectations around prototyping had not been adequately established and there was never a clear brief to build a specific design output, “...the level of commitment truly required to drive forward live prototyping within the timescales set out was not in place” (The Point People & Snook, 2015, p.24). It was therefore challenging for the designers to work in a context where they could not see or touch the concepts and project process. One of the policy team commissioners also reported their confusion at observing the prototyping process.
“...and there’s a sort of confidence... that [the lead designer] kept on talking about these messy lines and saying a lot “design is like this, and then there is an answer there”. And it’s just that the messy process is really counter-cultural.” (CS 1)