Dr Andrea Siodmok at the Open Policy Making Blog: “….In recent years, notable policy and business experts have been discussing the value of design and ‘design thinking’ as an approach to improving the way Government delivers services in one form or another for (and with) citizens. Examples include Roger Martin from Rotman Business School, Christian Bason formerly of Mindlab, Marco Steinberg of Sitra, Hilary Cottam of Participle, and many more who have been promoting the use of design as a tool for service transformation.
So what is design and how is it being applied in government? This is the question that has been posed this week at the Service Design in Government conference in London. This week is also the launch of some of the Policy Lab tools in the Policy Toolkit.
The Policy Lab have produced a short introduction to design, service design and design thinking. It serves to explain how we are defining and using the term design in various ways in a policy context as well as provide practical tools and examples of design being used in policy making.
We tend to spot design when it goes wrong: badly laid out forms, websites we can’t navigate, confusing signage, transport links that don’t join together, queues for services that are in demand. Bad design is a time thief. We can also spot good design when we see it, but how is it achieved?…(More)”