Transformation by Design Summary
This is my summary of the course Transformation by Design, one of the core classes at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose’s MPA in Innovation, Public Policy and Public Value.
Summary
- Design thinking is the process, methods and tools for creating human-centred products, services, solutions and experiences; we explored a variety of tools and case studies on how to do this effectively and meaningfully;
- Design thinking for policymaking is particularly important because it means tackling a problem in its entirety, instead of just one chunk;
- We need to innovate how we innovate to tackle the world’s grand challenges because the current systems are causing a lot of the problems we see today;
- Tech giants have created a state of surveillance capitalism, where there’s a lack of reciprocity between those who collect data, and those who have their data collected.
- Governments need to think about their digital services differently because they are tackling 21st century challenges, evaluating them with 20th century ideas, and responding with 19th century tools; and
- Most governments now have a digital unit to do digital government in a new way; we looked at different models and best practices for these units.
Design thinking
Design thinking is the processes, methods and tools for creating human-centred products, services, solutions and experiences through connecting with users. Design is a mindset and a set of methods, where the methods change but the mindset remains for each project. It makes conversations about the future specific, tangible and meaningful. Using design thinking to look at a problem means ‘thinking like a system’, where you take a holistic view of a problem, understand the type of problem (simple, complicated, complex or chaotic), the problem situation (technical or adaptive), and the power dynamics.
There are three categories of thinking for successful design thinking (1) leverage empathy and focus on clients more than yourself (e.g. reframing the issue to be more client focused); (2) encourage divergence & navigate ambiguity; and (3) rehearse new futures by testing with users, staff and stakeholders. There are also six principles of design (1) question assumptions; (2) use empathy by building things around users; (3) think expansively, rather than known knowns; (4) go form creative thinking to navigating through the real world; (5) prototype to see what things look like; and (6) insist on public value.
Collective intelligence is the data side of the citizen participation world, acknowledging that you want to work with people, while using technology to generate new kinds of data (see the Nesta playbook for examples on how to do this).
The double diamond is a framework of how a design process works with users: User behavioural research in a discovery phase -> Start synthesizing research to get to your problem definition -> User-led selection of solutions -> Start prototyping with people. During design processes, you need to simultaneously zoom in and out to understand the different levels and institutions involved in an issue and peoples’ lived experiences.
Although lots of governments conduct citizen participation, their activities are often only tokenism. Arnsetein’s ladder on the power dynamics between state and citizens looks at how to frame this process better:
Design thinking has produced mixed results. It is easy to think about design principles but harder to put them into practice. The key challenges of design thinking are that its subjectivity, divergent thinking and exposure to failure make people uncomfortable.
Design and public policy
Designing policy focuses on practical generation and exploration of new ideas to allow people to think across silos and surface the perspectives of beneficiaries and citizens. Policy is reconfigured by design in four ways, by: (1) focusing on outcomes over solutions; (2) creating systems that enable post production over standalone services; (3) experimenting to produce grounds for conviction; and (4) distributing over a hierarchical authority.
Policymakers need to look at how to multisolve — fixing many things simultaneously by breaking down silos and working across the system (e.g. dig up a road to fill a pothole but also put in new internet and other infrastructure, but then how could you go a step further, supporting health, jobs, retail, etc.). Programs like SBIR often struggle to succeed at developing new technology or having the desired impact because additional barriers get in the way (e.g. regulations for innovative healthtech). This is why a design process is important for public policy, because it allows policymakers to identify the longer term market from the start and complementary changes that may be required. This requires engaging creatively with laws and regulations, considering the details of a project (people, place and processes) and looking at how it sits in a broader system.
Using design-based approaches for social and public policy issues presents a paradox, where, on the one hand, creative methods enable people to asses the state of play and imagine how things might change, while, on the other hand, such approaches don’t lead to the hoped results because they don’t replace the need for parties and public administrators to have a vision, plan and make policies. They also don’t have the same legitimacy and accountability under the existing institutions, and design methods are hard to scale. You need to understand proportionality and then not use these tools for all problems.
Design thinking is being used for policy making through innovation labs, which identify routes to change, test innovations, seek feedback and iterate. It can feel like you’re not doing work because you don’t get to outcomes until after redefining a problem and developing a range of ideas. Innovation labs come in three forms:
Using design for grand challenges
Increasing complexity means we need new ways to scale innovation and increase diffusion by taking into account social and economic impact. Scaling isn’t linear and faces many barriers that can block innovation altogether. Instead, innovation must look at adaptive processes that engage broad networks of diverse stakeholders for systemic change. This is called systems leadership, which happens at the individual level (e.g. collaborative leadership, enable learning, trust building and empowering action with stakeholders); the community level (e.g. coalition building and advocacy to develop alignment and mobilize action among stakeholders in the system); and the system level (an understanding of the complex system shaping the challenge)
We live in an age of wicked problems and so we need system design to effectively tackle them. The next industrial revolution should be empowering and human-centred, instead of divisive and dehumanizing. This requires innovating how we innovate — it’s hard to use a knife to fix a wound. Governments should be tackling the grand problems real people face by using a mission-oriented approach, not just focusing on economic growth. These missions must be bold, inspirational, and have wide societal relevance. They indicate a clear direction, ideally targeted and measurable with ambitious actions. They need to be delivered through both top-down and bottom-up solutions, and co-created via cross disciplinary, cross-sector, multi-level engagement.
Digital governance
Invented by Google and elaborated at Facebook, surveillance capitalism is a new logic of accumulation that has spread to every sector and a vast range of products and services. It is not a single technology but what brings together things like AI and sensors, and then puts them into action. Surveillance capitalism conflates commercial imperative and technological necessity. The quality of prediction depends on the volume of inputs, which necessitates more extraction. But volume isn’t enough either; they need quality data, which has led to economies of scope to gain more intimate insights. There’s a lack of reciprocity with surveillance capitalist firms and their populations, but there’s also a dependency. The platform business model relies on a disregard for privacy. The power of surveillance capitalists is untamed by law, like capitalists in the Gilded Age before collective action brought new institutions. Big tech’s cultural hegemony seems to break when confronted by strong labour groups. That is why governments need to place more attention on workers’ rights.
Platforms are business models that bring different groups together using data. They act as intermediaries but extract the data from the interaction. Some are innovation platforms that allow new complementary services to be developed on them, others are transactional platforms or marketplaces, while a third kind are hybrids and use a mix of both to offer a mix of services. Platforms are increasingly shaping the world around us, whether it is Facebook with fake news and shaping the US elections, Amazon with logistics and automation leading to job losses, Uber with new business models, or Google with AI and how we interact with technology. Platforms create monopolies through network effects, where more users increase the value of a platform in a virtuous cycle. Data and interoperability then become important for competition law. We need to make antitrust policy less technocratic and stronger to limit big tech power and limit more M&As — looking at citizen welfare, not just consumer welfare. A better world would have smaller, more humane technology firms.
Data is seen in different ways: data as capital — it is accumulated and Governments need to create new markets for data and tax it differently; data as labour — people make data but this is unpaid work because it’s invisible, so data unions can help data workers capture their value; data as intellectual property — people can give licenses to have their data used in different ways using IP rights, so data trusts could facilitate this with some sort of legal mandate; data as public infrastructure — citizens decide what data is collected and how it is shared. To scale these models of data control, data needs to be interoperable.
To tame tech giants, a few policies include:
- Tax reform — tech giants should be paying tax where their users and data come from; international, we need to shut down tax havens
- Trade rules — need new results to prevent decoupling of supply chains so that no country is cut off from important technology inputs
- Labour laws — share wealth in new ways
- Data sharing — mandating data sharing for the Government to create public value (this is happening with coronavirus); use procurement to mandate data be returned and mobilized for public value
- Security provisions — increase protection in the frame of national security; stop M&As based on data access
- Democratic frameworks — limit the use of data for elections and political processes
- The world needs to strengthen regional blocs (e.g. in Latin America or Mercosur) to combat the power of big firms.
The world is full of ever more complex problems and we can’t just focus on big tech to solve them.
Digital government
Governments are juggling digital and regulatory mindsets where they are responsible for laws and regulations that don’t necessarily align with the realities of the digital world. Governments are tackling 21st century challenges, evaluating them with 20th century ideas and responding with 19th century tools. To understand 21st century technology, governments need to prototype it and then update regulations and institutions before it’s too late. The problem is governments often make short term moves over things with long term implications.
In the 80s there was a lot of outsourcing from the government to the private sector. Industry turned around and said it would use technology to solve government problems and save some money. By the 90s, enterprise IT became the owner of government services, and a few big players had an oligopoly over the market. These tech companies then built the digital infrastructure that many governments sit on 50 years later, which explains why so much of it doesn’t work. IT infrastructure ages like fish, whereas data ages like fine wine.
Many governments are trapped in the square of despair:
Government has destroyed trust in government services but with the high quality of services from private firms, governments are now finding it unacceptable to provide subpar services themselves. The last 30 years has seen increasing deregulation and outsourcing, in turn increasing inequalities. We need to make a case of public and civic value over private and individualistic value. This means less deregulation, increased municipal capabilities, regulations with social outcomes in mind that are informed by engagement, and civic ownership of core infrastructure (e.g. UK-GDS and Barcelona BCN Digital City Plan). This all requires direct engagement with a permanent city design and delivery teams for core services. Governments shouldn’t privatize railways, nor nationalize sandwiches — some things are too important, valuable and complex to be left to the private sector.
Most governments now have a digital unit to do digital government in a new way. The UK was a pioneer with this, starting around 2011 with the launch of its Government Digital Service (GDS). It worked like big IT firms by continuing to iterate on its products, putting out an alpha, then a beta before going live — but continuing to iterate — and working in small, multidisciplinary teams. It also used design principles to make a standard look and feel for government services, used simple language, and focused on making it easy for citizens to be able to access any website in a simple way. Many governments don’t understand how much money they can save by just simplifying their processes.
We talked about the many different approaches to digital services (e.g. US, Estonia, Mexico, Denmark, Uruguay, Argentina, Peru, Columbia, China, Abu Dhabi, etc.). It is important to have a strong mandate but presidential decree doesn’t work alone. Some of these services only respond to crises, which gives them a lot of power, but you should be trying to build capacity and avoid crises to begin with. Other digital services are just rebranding existing things without any real organizational changes.
What does work? Putting your users and their experience first and then working backwards to the technology. Use cloud based infrastructure. Bring in new people with different skills. Good service design means having fewer intermediaries between people and the government. Consistent design means more trust. Start small and grow fast.
