For about ten years now designers have been saying that their professional approach holds vital insights for public services. In the run-up to a lecture by David Willets to an LSE-Design Council event on innovating in public service design, Geoff Mulgan argues that recent research shows that it is not enough to be enthusiastic about this change. Designers do have useful methods to add, but they need to change their way of working for these to have more impact. A debate about how to do this has now started in earnest within the design community, both in the UK and overseas.
A flood of initiatives are using design methods to advance social innovation. The EMUDE programme (Emerging User Demands for Sustainable Solutions) is a set of activities funded by the European Commission. Amongst the pioneers in this area have been the design partnership IDEO , Thinkpublic, which terms itself a ‘social design agency’, and Participle which is ‘working to design the next generation of public services’.

There is growing interest in social design in its widest sense, not least in the context of the coalition government’s ‘big society’ theme. A number of fairly well-funded initiatives (such as EMUDE, the earlier RED initiative at the Design Council, the ongoing ‘Accelerating Innovation for Development’ programme at the Rockefeller Foundation) and the Social Innovation Exchange have applied design methods to improving the delivery of publicly funded services, with varying degrees of success.
And on 27 January a keynote talk by David Willets, the Minister of State for Universities and Science, and Lord Michael Bichard, Chairman of the Design Council, is a central event in a joint seminar series by the LSE Public Policy Group and the Design Council on ‘Innovating Through Design in Public Services’ that runs through to July with sessions every month.
Strong advocacy by the design community for involving their expertise has paid off in recent years in terms of increasing interest in what designers can offer to stimulate social innovation. But it has also led to serious criticisms. Now is a good moment to take stock of what is working and what could be working better. Here I suggest some of the strengths of current models, some of their weaknesses, and what might be the way forward.
This blog is intended chiefly a prompt for discussion – drawing on inputs from partners in the SIX network, drawn from around the world. It is not based on formal evaluations – the field has been surprisingly resistant to external measurement and evaluation, although several studies have been done within foundations and other funders, often with quite critical results.
Some key strengths of involving design in social innovation
The design method has many strengths in tackling public service problems and spurring social innovation, including:
- Freshness and clarity, sharpening understanding of problems, seeing in new ways.
- Novel insights. Designers bring a different perspective that stems from not being a regular part of the field already, not being implicated in the profession or bureaucracy already handling implementation, etc.
- Visualization techniques can be a vital complement to the dominant text-based or prose-based methods of public policy. And visualizing issues and possible solutions can be very good for involving a wider range of the public in the design process.
- Seeing the user perspective as central is a vital complement to conventional, top- down methods.
- Following service journeys often reveals new patterns, where blockages occur, and how experiences vary
- Fast prototyping is a superior method for testing models and possible solutions rapidly in practice
- Some good tools for thinking systemically exist, such as following through food systems, energy flows, or care components.
- Catalytic effects can flow from designers’ involvement, helping to energise change, and especially to strengthen the innovators within the public services and in outside groups and NGOs.
Some characteristic weaknesses of design projects
At the same time there are some recurring issues that tend to sap the positive impacts of designers’ involvement, including:
- Cost. Bringing highly paid consultants into poor communities for a brief time can create resentment, both in the UK and the wider world. It often entails high unit costs for projects in developed countries, especially compared to parallel ventures that are organized bottom-up or in civil society.
- Lack of commitment. The design experts move quickly in and out in some of the projects.
- Designers are good at creativity, but poor at implementation. Often, however, the devil is in the detail and projects need to be hard fought through at all stages, especially implementation, if innovations are to be realized.
- Reinventing the wheel is a risk. As a corollary of taking a fresh view, designers have a tendency to ignore past evidence and learning from the field. Sometimes designers even present this as a virtue.
- Lack of economics and numeracy amongst designers can undermine the prospects for implementation, because at root everything in public services needs to live within a budget. There are also risks of gold-plating models of provision.
- Lack of organisational knowledge amongst designer can again undermine the prospects for new solutions being ‘owned’ by the agencies that must undertake implementation.
- The need for much more rigour in systems thinking also shows through. Designers currently make little use of the best systems tools.
- Specialization. The great majority of service design activity is not actually being done by service design organizations, but by generalist designers.
- Lack of learning. Often designers need to learn more from other organizations and other fields with claims to insight into service design – including especially social entrepreneurs, public service professions, consultancies, IT firms, and policy makers.
Four key challenges for designers
If the design industry and service designers are to genuinely maximize the contribution they can make to boosting social innovation and improving public services they need to address some critical issues in how the education, socialization and formation of designers as professionals takes place:
- Formation – involves issues around how to train and develop people with an appropriate combination of design skills along with other key skills, such as knowledge of economics, policy-making, and social knowledge. In the SIX project (the Social Innovation Exchange) we have proposed a new approach to ‘T’ shaped skills for designers to reduce the risks identified above.
- Method – how to develop design methods so as to improve the prospects for achieving impacts and maximizing implementation. This is an area now being taken forward in the Global Innovation Academy programme.
- Cost – we need to develop methods for involving designers that create and leave behind more skills in the organizations or communities that we are helping, and that have lower unit costs.
- Conversations with related fields are critical. Just as bureaucracies, public managers and professionals need to learn from design, so designers and design approaches need to learn from related fields.
This blog was originally a note prepared for the Social Innovation Exchange, whose excellent blogsites is at http://www.socialinnovationexchange.org/sixblog.
To learn more about the joint seminar series run by the LSE Public Policy group and the Design Council on ‘Innovating Through Design in Public Services’ please click the link. To attend, please e-mail j.tinkler@lse.ac.uk
————————–
Click here to respond to this post
Please read our comments policy before
Dear all, thank you for sharing your thoughts on strengths and weaknesses of service design. I find this debate quite timely. I agree on most of what has been said already and just wanted to add a couple of reflections from my own experience starting socially responsive design projects and trying to deliver sustainable solutions for the public and third sector in the past years.
Currently writing from San Francisco, where I’m attending the global Service Design Network annual conference, titled: ‘From sketchbook to spreadsheet’ (http://service-design-network.org/conference2011/). The service design community is still trying to find the right model and business argument to prove the added value of what is delivering. Selling processes and working methodologies, instead of pre-packed solutions, is what innovators struggle with all the time (how do you sell something that you haven’t designed yet and estimate its potential value or impact?). I would say this is common throughout all the creative industries, however it gets harder when talking about a more intangible offer such as services or experiences.
We could start looking at the gaps in the market and easily identify many opportunities for service design to play a very specific role in the creation and delivery of public services. However, designers and social entrepreneurs are driven by passion and ideas and the business model is often retro-fitted in order to make those happen. This may not sound very strategic, but is what I see and experience everyday: I meet and talk to people with ideas, will and resources to make the change happen. Then they may lack skills and experience, they may struggle explaining what they exactly do or want (not great selling point) and have little clue on how to win the trust of potential clients who may do a leap of faith to commission them a piece of work (without considering the already mentioned insurance policy requirements to work in the area, the need for limited liability, reputation/track record and the complex dynamics of the public and third sector which most of the time is more about politics rather than people or business models). In the UK we have been lucky enough to have organisations that promote and invest in this sector, while in the rest of Europe we are just moving the first steps in that direction.
Wanted just to comments on two points raised above: ‘formation’ and ‘conversation’.
Formation:
When trying to introduce service design I often end up talking about three key concepts: creativity (design), empathy (people-centric) and strategy (from management to delivery). Paradoxically many people would argue that you can’t teach the first two, but just provide an environment where you can learn and nurture creativity and empathy in your own terms and maybe share and compare with others. Strategy on the other hand is something that can be taught and most of its elements are transferable across sectors (from private to public). So, this is the picture: we’ve got lots of talented creative young professionals who are passioned about working with people (they have got already what we can’t teach them), but they miss the ‘knowhow’ and a bit of experience. How can we transform this massive potential into real practice?
Conversation:
Endless debate about designers learning business skills and business people learning design thinking. The obvious answer, as Sarah suggests, is collaboration, not just learning from other disciplines but actually working together, and learn as you do it. So the real question here is how do we make collaboration effective? I believe in the great added value of collaborative working practice, but in most of the cases it just ends up being a disaster. How do we learn and what do we need to work together more effectively? Conversation skill? Mediation or ‘translation’ capacity?
It won’t be certainly easy to transform the enthusiasm of many into tangible and sustainable services, enterprises or solutions. Let’s surf the wave before it breaks first and demonstrate that it is possible. Then we will open a surfing school (before the tide changes again).
Hello,
It was really interesting to read this post from the ‘service design’ side, or whatever it is that I am. I am, by trade, just a designer.
As someone who studied design for 4 years and took a keen interest in my design skills applied to service (again I am not just a service designer) then undertook a masters in design innovation with specialisation in the public sector and working inside a Scottish public body for 12 month I share and agree with some of the insights you have outlined. The negatives, and those that have been quoted from Geoff Mulgan around the net and in presentations are true, and the positives, well they’re true, visualisation is a core skill, in fact journey mapping is often missed out and I’ve been lucky to use this very very simple tool with planning partnerships, and off shoots of the NHS and public servants have been shocked by the disconnect between services and how difficult it is for people to live a happy/easy life even thought the services/system they use doesn’t make it quite so easy.
I guess the best way for me to respond to your post is to stick up for the negatives in some sort of way, or shed some light on why some of the negatives are in existence. But I’ll finish with a much more positive outlook.
* Cost.
If you run a consultancy, especially working with a council, insurance costs alot, tools cost alot, buying software to make things costs alot. Tools cost alot. Renting a studio *can* cost alot. Now I’ve always worked in a shoe string budget way, and I don’t speak for everyone, but work is not always continuous, so I understand some of the costly fees for designers. Doesn’t make it right, but I understand.
* Lack of commitment and
* Designers are good at creativity, but poor at implementation.
Yes, very true. I have, however, witnessed a change in some design education to cover this lack of getting to delivery part. Also, I’d like to point out that designers are often commissioned in a way that they are not happy with. Often the problem/even idea has been outlined and a poorly written brief to boot, so where better research could have been achieved to frame a problem correctly, it has not been done so. Secondly (and I can’t find the link) a great report was written on designers being involved in research, as to transform user needs/insight into ideas often needs someone who has first hand seen and been part of the research, at least to aid driving the process forward.
* Reinventing the wheel is a risk and
* Lack of economics and numeracy amongst designers can undermine the prospects for implementation
Very true, and a fault of design education sometimes. We need more collaborative work between disciplines (economists/techies/business heads). Problem is, your time is spent on becoming a ‘good’ designer (whatever that means) and there isn’t much time to think about other things you should know.
Don Norman wrote a great article and it chimed with some student work I had seen where pretty much a simple web2.0 technology which could have been adapted to a situation had been reinvented.
http://www.core77.com/blog/columns/why_design_education_must_change_17993.asp
* Lack of organisational knowledge and all the other points you raised.
Here in lies where I think service design thinking should be applied. To create more designful organisations. To create public bodies, orgs, houses, whatever, equipped to work in the way in which say, ‘service design’ does, but by building in house capabilities. An understanding of design and doing it, will inform and create better briefs for the experts. I’ve just spent 12 months working with a public body helping them to embed designers (and more to the point design) into the DNA of their organisation. It is, and will in time, make a huge difference to a top down, board room norm of making ideas up based on policy about what some public servants (and I am not saying all, I’m saying some) think people need. I have witnessed, and this is what made me start to look at designful organisations, do the work I do and why design could be useful (the people centered approach as you had mentioned) some really, really terrible decisions and designs made because of a broken system within the public sector. Ideas in boardrooms, uninformed policy, tick box attitudes and badly put out tenders to create a disconnected, poor service experience for the public in the UK. Service design doesn’t have to be about innovation, it can be about good service delivery, and at the end of the day, most designers drive is to make things better.
I gave a talk and barely scratched the surface on most of these thoughts and my thesis I spent the last few months writing/putting together but some thoughts are in there surrounding a project I was part of in Glasgow. I’m critical and look at transformative ways of working/coproduction as ways of ensuring delivery and not parachuting in as ‘save the day designers’ because, that’s bullshit, and anyone who thinks that way should be locked in a cupboard.
We should however think about more joined up organisations and building capabilities to design and deliver good services, and not just the front end ‘sexy’ user stuff and look at some pretty post its, but by working with organisational developers, economists to create structured organisations ready to ‘do’ innovation. Alas, it is a HUGE task and one that will take time, I hope to start blogging soon about some thoughts I have had on this subject.
Here’s that talk.
http://thinkdesignchange.com/35714713
At last. I’m a social tenant on an estate that, gasp, functioned as a very good community. The housing trust that mismanages our homes decided that they must destroy them to make them better. Architects created an absolutely miserable plan that took over 2 years of rigorous application from borough planning committees and a local councillor to make them barely acceptable. But the focus was on design rather than whether tenants wanted their homes demolished and community destroyed. As it is, we’re still stuck with minor roads being reattached to major because it’s currently fashionable, graffiti where none existed on good solid family homes that have stood empty for months, and a precious green space in the process of being destroyed for the builders to put their equipment for the next 12 years. What I’d add to your list is that designers, architects and so on should live for some time in the communities that they want to mess about with. Until they do all their middle class knowledge is patronising, academic and largely useless. Since cost is all that anyone is interested in rather than value, it’s worth noting that so far before one home is demolished, one brick laid, this scheme has cost £11 MILLION. The cost in bad will, endless.