Blog by Rainer Kattel: “The UK government published last week the Public Design Evidence Review (PDER), an ambitious attempt to answer a deceptively simple question: How do we create better public policies and services that consistently achieve their intended outcomes? One of the answers, the report argues, lies in public design — a term the report introduces… public design fundamentally challenges modernist assumptions about how governments should work: it questions and expands the idea that politics is about representation and that bureaucracy is about neutral expertise. Instead, it imagines governance as a dynamic, participatory, and creative process, as summarised in the figure below from the PDER report.
Despite these promising ideas and examples, public design remains underdeveloped as a system-wide public practice. Evidence is often limited to individual case studies, with few robust measures of impact — especially on systemic change. There are brilliant cases like Dan Hill’s work Swedish innovation agency, Vinnova. But mostly design roles are still not embedded across the civil service. Toolkits are scattered. Teams often lack shared job descriptions or metrics to evaluate success.
That’s why the Public Design Evidence Review is so important. It systematises the scattered evidence, identifies promising practices, and points toward what needs to change.
To make public design transformative, we need to learn from the digital transformation journey. That means:
- Standardising design roles in government job descriptions and team structures
- Scaling access to design toolkits across departments and agencies
- Measuring impact not just in outputs but in terms of systemic change, dynamic capabilities, and long-term value creation…(More)”.
