While policy is a means for governments to respond to and address public problems, designers have expressed challenges with how the processes of policymaking are run. Work considered as design for policy, both in research and practice, focuses on the use of design practices to address public problems through policy.Ī review of the design for policy discourse evidences a distance between the discourses from design and policy. Under the umbrella term design for policy, this discourse is increasingly engaged with by scholars, practitioners and commentators from both fields of design and policy. The paper concludes with a discussion on how Policy Lab uses creative and visual methods to facilitate processes of co-creative reflection.Īs designers are expanding their territory and have gone to work at national government offices, the appropriation of these methods for this traditionally non-design profession has received much academic interest. We then introduce key insights from our fieldwork. The article starts with an introduction to the prevailing literature on Design for Policy, followed by a brief overview of the fieldwork conducted at Policy Lab. In this article, we discuss instances from our fieldwork that demonstrated how Policy Lab used design methods to support reflection around evidence by policymakers. In order to externalise their thinking processes, designers have developed a wide range of creative and visual methods that enable them to document and communicate their deliberation and decision-making processes in designerly ways ( Dix and Gongora, 2011). Rather than putting their decision making down as creative intuition, this critical awareness enables designers to highlight how knowledge informs their decisions and practice ( Hummels and Frens, 2009 Dix and Gongora, 2011). This understanding of decision-making processes is valuable for designers, as it enables them to articulate their agency in the process of understanding and interpreting knowledge. Schön’s notion of the reflective practitioner describes the ability to learn about one’s own practice through being aware of what influences one’s decision making, and to reflect on these influences in order to critically assess the validity of a choice ( Schön, 1983). We found Policy Lab positions and leverages collaborative reflective thinking in design methods to encourage policymakers to behave as reflective practitioners in their profession. However, the insights from our participant observation at Policy Lab offers a more nuanced view. The existing literature on design for policy highlights the challenging relationship between predominant forms of evidence-based policymaking and the forms of evidence that may be understood and built on using visual and creative methods. The research set out to understand how and to what purpose human-centred and future-oriented methods were utilised by Policy Lab, and how these influenced policymakers who had worked with Policy Lab on projects and participated in activities facilitated by them. This study was part of a wider research programme investigating the role of design in policymaking and policy design practices in UK Government. We draw on a two-month participant-observation at Policy Lab, conducted by the lead author at the start of 2019. This paper explores the role design practices and methods play in policymaking processes within the UK central government. Initiatives like Policy Lab present opportunities for exploring design practices – predominantly from Service design ( Kimbell, 2015) – to provide alternative or additional approaches to conventional policymaking processes. A prominent example of one such lab is UK Policy Lab (henceforth referred to as Policy Lab), which was set up in 2014 within the UK central government’s Cabinet Office as part of the civil service reform strategy ( Policy Lab, n.d.). Over the last decade, labs like these have started to explore the specific role visual and creative methods play in policymaking practices. Generally understood as a response to overcome limitations of current policymaking practices, the remit of PSI-labs is to support governments in establishing change in policymaking practices, such as enabling policymakers to include new forms of evidence and break through departmental siloes ( Rutter, 2012 Hermus et al, 2020). Public Sector Innovation Labs (PSI-Labs) – regularly called Policy Labs – are spaces within public bodies to help embed new forms of innovation and experimentation within government and tackle complex public and social issues.

Collabrative creative collection