Rising Wisely

Service design and public policy have been getting closer and closer to each other in recent years – at least among leading design thinkers and strategists. Part of this turn has been driven by the need to ensure more participation among policy makers and members of civil society. The currency of this participation and engagement has historically been developed by designers – designers whose aim has been to create successful communication strategies, product lines, and service offerings. Another facet to this confluence of design and policy has been the slow unfolding among policy makers, designers, scientists, and other knowledge producers that the facts needed to drive good decision making made in ways we are only beginning to get a full picture of.

Many facts that were once assumed to be self-evident, such as the existence of gravity or of gasses in the atmosphere, have been shown, while fundamentally true, to have also been the acute products of their time and cultures that developed them. This doesn’t mean that they are invalid. It simply means that we could just have easily arrived at different conventions for the length of a year, the weight of a kilogram, or the names and properties of each element in the periodic table.

From a policy perspective, this has obvious implications for the validity of different alternatives. From a design perspective, it validates the processes that have come in tow with so-called design thinking – processes that place users at the forefront of questions about the role of policy, infrastructure, bureaucracy, and governance in the social century.

Recently, the Glen Cove Conference on Strategic Design and Public Policy was held in Glen Cove, NY, on 9-11 June, 2010. Initiated by Derek Miller and Lisa Rudnick of the UN Institute for Disarmament Research (UNIDIR), and co-organized by Lucy Kimbell (based at Said Business School) and Gerry Philipsen (Center for Local Strategies Research, University of Washington), the event was conceived of as a small workshop which would bring together – for the first time, as far as they were aware – three groups:

• policymakers concerned with security in intrastate contexts and post-conflict situations, whose work is typically structured by intergovernmental and national policy goals;
• social science researchers, in particular ethnographers of communication who pay special attention to the construction of local knowledge, for example, how “security” is understood in communities in which the UN has a mandate to do increase it and having decided to help disarm ex-combatants; and
• designers and managers involved in designing services shaped by policy concerns about politics, exclusion and access.

Two participants blogged about their experiences: Lucy Kimbell a designer at the Said Business School and Aditya Dev Sood, one of India’s own and founder of CKS, a design consultancy based in Delhi and Bangalore. Links to their impressions and accounts follow below.

Lucy Kimbell: http://designleadership.blogspot.com/2010/07/glen-cove-conference-on-strategic.html

Aditya Dev Sood: http://www.cks.in/leedbackfoop/#section13

Thanks to experientia: putting people first for the find