Policy Brief by UserCentriCities project: “.. looks critically at the need for putting citizens at the heart of digital government – and analyses six successful projects in key European cities: Bologna (Emilia Romagna Region), Espoo, Milan, Murcia, Rotterdam and Tallinn. Building on lessons learned in a year of structured interviews with leading officials in the UserCentriCities project, the policy brief looks at key trends driving breakthroughs in digital-service delivery – in the public and private sector – and proposes a five-point roadmap for greater Europe-national-local collaboration in the service of citizens. The policy brief will launch at The 2021 UserCentriCities Summit, in the presence of Boštjan Koritnik, minister for public administration of Slovenia, which currently holds the Presidency of the Council of the European Union….(More)”.
Design for Social Innovation: Case Studies from Around the World
Book edited By Mariana Amatullo, Bryan Boyer, Jennifer May and Andrew Shea: “The United Nations, Australia Post, and governments in the UK, Finland, Taiwan, France, Brazil, and Israel are just a few of the organizations and groups utilizing design to drive social change. Grounded by a global survey in sectors as diverse as public health, urban planning, economic development, education, humanitarian response, cultural heritage, and civil rights, Design for Social Innovation captures these stories and more through 45 richly illustrated case studies from six continents.
From advocating to understanding and everything in between, these cases demonstrate how designers shape new products, services, and systems while transforming organizations and supporting individual growth.
How is this work similar or different around the world? How are designers building sustainable business practices with this work? Why are organizations investing in design capabilities? What evidence do we have of impact by design? Leading practitioners and educators, brought together in seven dynamic roundtable discussions, provide context to the case studies.
Design for Social Innovation is a must-have for professionals, organizations, and educators in design, philanthropy, social innovation, and entrepreneurship. This book marks the first attempt to define the contours of a global overview that showcases the cultural, economic, and organizational levers propelling design for social innovation forward today…(More)”
Developing indicators to support the implementation of education policies
OECD Report: “Across OECD countries, the increasing demand for evidence-based policy making has further led governments to design policies jointly with clear measurable objectives, and to define relevant indicators to monitor their achievement. This paper discusses the importance of such indicators in supporting the implementation of education policies.
Building on the OECD education policy implementation framework, the paper reviews the role of indicators along each of the dimensions of the framework, namely smart policy design, inclusive stakeholder engagement, and conducive environment. It draws some lessons to improve the contribution of indicators to the implementation of education policies, while taking into account some of their perennial challenges pertaining to the unintended effects of accountability. This paper aims to provide insights to policy makers and various education stakeholders, to initiate a discussion on the use and misuse of indicators in education, and to guide future actions towards a better contribution of indicators to education policy implementation…..(More)”.
The Future is not a Solution
Essay by Laura Forlano: “The future is a particular kind of speaker,” explains communication scholar James W. Carey, “who tells us where we are going before we know it ourselves.” But in discussions about the nature of the future, the future as an experience never appears. This is because “the future is always offstage and never quite makes its entrance into history; the future is a time that never arrives but is always awaited.” Perhaps this is why, in the American context, there is a widespread tendency to “discount the present for the future,” and see the “future as a solvent” for existing social problems.
Abstract discussions of the “the future” miss the mark. That is because experience changes us. Anyone that has lived through the last 18 months of the COVID-19 pandemic would surely agree. While health experts are well aware of the ongoing global risks posed by pandemics, no one—not even an algorithm—can predict exactly when, where, and how they might come to be. And, yet, since spring 2020, there has been a global desire to understand precisely what is next, how to navigate uncertain futures as well as adapt to long-term changes. The pandemic, according to the writer Arundhati Roy, is “a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.”
In order to understand the choices that we are facing, it is necessary to understand the ways in which technologies and futures are often linked—socially, politically, and commercially —through their promises of a better tomorrow, one just beyond our grasp. Computer scientist Paul Dourish and anthropologist Genevieve Bell refer to these as “technovisions” or the stories that technologists and technology companies tell about the role of computational technologies in the future. Technovisions portray technological progress as inevitable—becoming cultural mythologies and self-fulfilling prophecies. They explain that the “proximate future,” a future that is “indefinitely postponed” is a key feature of research and practice in the field of computing that allows technology companies to “absolve themselves of the responsibilities of the present” by assuming that “certain problems will simply disappear of their own accord—questions of usability, regulation, resistance, adoption barriers, sociotechnical backlashes, and other concerns are erased.”…(More)”
Impact Evidence and Beyond: Using Evidence to Drive Adoption of Humanitarian Innovations
Learning paper by DevLearn: “…provides guidance to humanitarian innovators on how to use evidence to enable and drive adoption of innovation.
Innovation literature and practice show time and time again that it is difficult to scale innovations. Even when an innovation is demonstrably impactful, better than the existing solution and good value for money, it does not automatically get adopted or used in mainstream humanitarian programming.
Why do evidence-based innovations face difficulties in scaling and how can innovators best position their innovation to scale?
This learning paper is for innovators who want to effectively use evidence to support and enable their journey to scale. It explores the underlying social, organisational and behavioural factors that stifle uptake of innovations.
It also provides guidance on how to use, prioritise and communicate evidence to overcome these barriers. The paper aims to help innovators generate and present their evidence in more tailored and nuanced ways to improve adoption and scaling of their innovations….(More)”.
Design as Democratic Inquiry
Book by Carl DiSalvo: “Through practices of collaborative imagination and making, or “doing design otherwise,” design experiments can contribute to keeping local democracies vibrant.
In this counterpoint to the grand narratives of design punditry, Carl DiSalvo presents what he calls “doing design otherwise.” Arguing that democracy requires constant renewal and care, he shows how designers can supply novel contributions to local democracy by drawing together theory and practice, making and reflection. The relentless pursuit of innovation, uncritical embrace of the new and novel, and treatment of all things as design problems, says DiSalvo, can lead to cultural imperialism. In Design as Democratic Inquiry, he recounts a series of projects that exemplify engaged design in practice. These experiments in practice-based research are grounded in collaborations with communities and institutions.
The projects DiSalvo describes took place from 2014 to 2019 in Atlanta. Rather than presume that government, industry—or academia—should determine the outcome, the designers began with the recognition that the residents and local organizations were already creative and resourceful. DiSalvo uses the projects to show how design might work as a mode of inquiry. Resisting heroic stories of design and innovation, he argues for embracing design as fragile, contingent, partial, and compromised. In particular, he explores how design might be leveraged to facilitate a more diverse civic imagination. A fundamental tenet of design is that the world is made, and therefore it could be made differently. A key concept is that democracy requires constant renewal and care. Thus, designing becomes a way to care, together, for our collective future…(More)”.
Perspectives on Digital Humanism
Open Access Book edited by Hannes Werthner, Erich Prem, Edward A. Lee, and Carlo Ghezzi: “Digital Humanism is young; it has evolved from an unease about the consequences of a digitized world for human beings, into an internationally connected community that aims at developing concepts to provide a positive and constructive response. Following up on several successful workshops and a lecture series that bring together authorities of the various disciplines, this book is our latest contribution to the ongoing international discussions and developments. We have compiled a collection of 46 articles from experts with different disciplinary and institutional backgrounds, who provide their view on the interplay of human and machine.
Please note our open access publishing strategy for this book to enable widespread circulation and accessibility. This means that you can make use of the content freely, as long as you ensure appropriate referencing. At the same time, the book is also published in printed and online versions by Springer….(More)”.
Systemic Mapping and Design Research: Towards Participatory Democratic Engagement
Paper by Juan de LaRosa, Stan Ruecker, Carolina Giraldo Nohora: “This article presents an argument to extend possibilities and discussions about the role of design in democratic participation. We ground this argument in case studies and observations of several grassroots experimental participatory design workshops run with the intention of producing spaces for community deliberation and a tangible transformation of these communities. These cases show how systemic mapping and prototyping are used to increase community understanding of how potential futures represent values systems that should correspond to the values the community would like to see in place. The methodologies used on these workshops are presented it here as an opportunity to question the role of design in democratic deliberation and policy making….(More)”.
The Time Tax
Article by Annie Lowrey: “…In my decade-plus of social-policy reporting, I have mostly understood these stories as facts of life. Government programs exist. People have to navigate those programs. That is how it goes. But at some point, I started thinking about these kinds of administrative burdens as the “time tax”—a levy of paperwork, aggravation, and mental effort imposed on citizens in exchange for benefits that putatively exist to help them. This time tax is a public-policy cancer, mediating every American’s relationship with the government and wasting countless precious hours of people’s time.
The issue is not that modern life comes with paperwork hassles. The issue is that American benefit programs are, as a whole, difficult and sometimes impossible for everyday citizens to use. Our public policy is crafted from red tape, entangling millions of people who are struggling to find a job, failing to feed their kids, sliding into poverty, or managing a disabling health condition.
… the government needs to simplify. For safety-net programs, this means eliminating asset tests, work requirements, interviews, and other hassles. It means federalizing programs like unemployment insurance and Medicaid. It means cross-coordinating, so that applicants are automatically approved for everything for which they qualify.
Finally, it needs to take responsibility for the time tax. Congress needs to pump money into the civil service and into user-friendly, citizen-centered programmatic design. And the federal government needs to reward states and the executive agencies for increasing uptake and participation rates, while punishing them for long wait times and other bureaucratic snafus.
Such changes would eliminate poverty and encourage trust in government. They would make American lives easier and simpler. Yes, Washington should give Americans more money and more security. But most of all, it should give them back their time….(More)”.
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What is the difference between current awareness and horizon scanning?
An informed perspective is more important than ever in order to anticipate what comes next and succeed in emerging futures”. HBR, October 16, 2015
Article by Clare Brown: “Legal professionals are busy people. They are concerned with doing the best they can for their clients and making sure that their business runs smoothly. Trend spotting or horizon scanning isn’t necessarily at the top of their daily “to do” lists but if they want to grow the firm effectively, everyone – from trainee to managing partner – needs to anticipate future events.
The best way information people can help to do this is to first understand how everything fits together. We need to look at the difference between current awareness and horizon scanning – and put them both into a wider strategic context. When we present our management teams with evidence that they need automated current awareness, we should also be dazzling them with future information possibilities.
…The answer might lie in a strategic and collaborative form of foresight, or as Kerstin E. Cuhls defines it, “a systematic debate of complex futures”. Large corporations, governments and intergovernmental organisations have used various methods to use information in their efforts to predict all possible outcomes. For instance,
Georghiou (2007) reported that foresight activities have been conducted in conjunction with NIS in the USA, Canada, UK, Germany, The Netherlands, Austria, Russia, Australia, New Zealand, Columbia, India, South Korea, Kazakhstan, Taiwan, Malaysia, Egypt, Morocco, South Africa and other countries. In Germany, the Fraunhofer Society has taken the lead in progressively applying foresight not only in NIS but also in the preparation of strategic scenarios at the corporate level (Cuhls, 2015). (Yuichi Washida and Akihisa Yahata “Predictive value of horizon scanning for future scenarios in Foresight, 3 February 2021)
The excellent article on horizon scanning I mentioned above explains how they attempt it. In essence, it involves literature searches, conversations, taking a broad view, and being open to any and all possibilities:
- Structured: it is a systematic approach by applying methods of futures research, science-based, and based on new theories of futures research
- Debate: it includes interaction of relevant actors, active preparation for the future or different futures, and orientation towards shaping the future
- Complex: it includes the consideration of systemic interdependencies, takes a holistic view
- Futures is plural: it is an open view on different paths into the future with thinking in alternatives. We also envisage different types of futures, in futures research we differentiate between possible, probable and preferable futures…(More)”.