Challenging the dogma of public service design

Earlier in the week I read this article about Hilary Cottam’s Participle project. Shamefully, this was the first time that I had come across Hilary’s work, but it resonated strongly with the broader design philosophy that my team have been developing and using since 2008. The main thrust of Participle is to bring together multi-disciplinary teams to solve deeply entrenched social welfare issues with a sceptical eye for the dogma that is often entrenched in the official institutions. In her own words:

 “I don’t think designers can solve the worlds problems but I think designers with other people can, and I think design provides the most incredible common language for this work. What we’ve been asking [at Participle] is ‘How do people want to live? What is a flourishing life for the 21st century?’ … In the UK our debates are so locked down in money and institutions, when what is needed is profound cultural change. It’s thinking in a different way, and design is that: designers think in a different way and they build, they create, don’t just analyse.”

My observations are entirely consistent with this. Welfare service delivery is often tackled as a 'policy’, ‘technology’ or ‘delivery’ challenge. In each case, the team that is assembled has experience in the appropriate discipline. Assuming that the diagnosis is correct (and it often is not), the solution to the challenge will, by definition, be framed within the intellectual framework in question. In my experience, the initial diagnosis of the problem is rarely right and yet teams plough on regardless as they are none the wiser. The secret to Participle’s success seems to be the ability to interrogate issues from different viewpoints and with different analytical frameworks. The ensuing debate within the design team about the root causes and possible solutions will be so much richer for the diversity of perspectives and is far more likely to result in positive result.

A second quote in the article further piqued my interest:

“I think what’s also really interesting is that even when we have [new] technology, we try to use it to prop up those old systems: we tag prisoners we don’t educate them, even though they all re-offend, and we hang bleepers around older people’s necks rather than building a system like Circle which stops them falling over in the first place.”

This statement is so true.  It is too easy for teams to think that technology is simply a way of making existing processes marginally more effective and efficient. It takes a strong leader to challenge the status quo and ask the question: “Is this the best way of achieving the outcomes we want or does this new technology allow us to think about the approach in a completely different way”? When I think about my City clients and how they look at technologies like IoT, Analytics, Cloud, etc; my instinct is that they are looking at the problem through the lens of the existing systems, processes and operating model of the city. These technologies fundamentally challenge the status quo, but it requires both strong leadership and a design driven mentality to take the leap. 

The final statement that got me thinking was this:

What is needed now, she says, is a system that doesn’t just fund innovative welfare projects for a short pilot phase, but provides long term investment in new systems and services that will save money – and improve people’s lives – in the long run. 

We seem to be trapped in an eddy of social welfare pilots that show promise, get funded and then are left to wither on the vine. This may be a result of the widespread fiscal austerity that is often a fact of life. However, I suspect that there is more that we can do in the policy environment to design new funding models and social investment vehicles, that will enable these great projects like Backr and Circle to thrive.

If anyone out there reading this has ideas, I would love to see them in the comments and start a dialogue around how we can bring them to the forefront and put them in front of leaders in social welfare delivery.