

Sometimes tweeting about #infrastructure, landscape, design, cycling & #opendata. Views at least my own.
…olicy and Public Value at UCL IIPP focusing on strategic design as one of its four primary modules. Part of the reason that the public sector both fails to appropriately handle the design-led tech companies or absorb their more useful qualities, is often, simply, that there are no strategic designers there; or, in other words, there are few in public service actively practicing those core skills of integration, visualisation, synthesis or stewardship. We must re-create this capability. For organisations with public purpose, the MPA could be a counte…
…e value of building these capabilities in-house, reversing the knee-jerk instinct to outsource. But as well as attempting to directly ‘own’ the relationship with citizens, via excellent service delivery – something that governments must realise is fundamentally important to an existential degree – these new services actively construct new images or public ideas (or in sociological terms, new ‘imaginaries’.)
This latter aspect is where strategic design may have much to offer. Design is intrinsically about decision-making, about thinking through doing. Crucially, strategic design takes the core principles of contemporary design practice – user research and ethnography, agile development, iterative prototyping, participation and co-design, stewardship, working across networks, scales and timeframes – and then it points this toolkit at ethical concerns, addressing systemic change within complex systems, and broader societal outcomes. Design’s ‘real world’ task at this point must involve balancing individual needs with wider societa…