Designing for Policymaking: A Reflection
What comes to your mind when you think about designing for policymaking or designing for policies? Words such as “complex”, “difficult” and “tough” would be one of the first things that we probably can think about. We all know that designing for policymaking isn’t easy, yet it affects each of us and is therefore important to discuss.
At IBM, Service Design practitioners have gathered together to form the internal IBM Service Design Guild. As part of this initiative, we host a speaker series in which we invite external speakers from around the globe to share their case studies, thoughts or advice on Service Design. This time, we dedicated our speaker series to the topic of designing for policymaking and had the honor to have Spanish researcher and strategic designer, Beatriz Belmonte, as a speaker in May 2023. Beatriz shared her experience with our global IBM design community and dove into the history of design in the public sector, as well as main differentiators between public versus private sector design.
Beatriz spoke to eight key challenges between public and private sector design:
- Terms & procurement cycles
- Public procurement
- Laws & norms
- Implementation gap
- Accountability & agility
- Design drivers
- Public value
- Public innovation ecosystems
We would like to highlight three challenges that most of us can relate to in our daily design work:
Implementation gap
Beatriz highlighted the implementation gap in design for policymaking, meaning that the people defining policies are often removed from the people implementing the policies. She gave examples such as government services that are provided specifically for women which closed at 5 p.m., after average working hours. Working women and/or mothers had difficulty accessing these services because the implementors were not in sync with the designers. This shows that the service did not accommodate for different types of users, in this case the working women. Where this challenge stood out, we see potential overlap with the private sector. Designers in the private sector typically are not the ones both designing and implementing services, policies or designs. It is on behalf of the designer to understand the audience in which they design for to ensure their work is to the fullest degree of accuracy and anticipation, however it remains on the shoulders of a product or policy owner to implement changes.
“We need to put people’s rights at the center and if we don’t know those rights, it is really difficult to consider them in design.”
- Beatriz Belmonte, 2023
Accountability & agility
Beatriz spoke to the difference in accountability and agility in the public sector, meaning the start-up mentality that so many corporations aim to integrate into their culture. However, it is not applicable to the public sector, which is risk-adverse. The kinds of prototyping seen in policymaking can be different than private sector prototyping. The “first wave” of prototyping in public sectors often includes storyboarding, paper mockups and space hacks, and the “second wave” of prototyping includes living labs, live simulation, and regulatory sandboxes (source: Margaret Hagan. 2018. How do we get to more ambitious civic innovation? Prototyping for policy. Standford Law School). This style of prototyping allows designers to experiment with the implementing policies in controlled environments rather than implementation in the “real world”, which allows us to identify potential unintended consequences. Finding ways to test prototypes beforehand is significant to ensure that we consider the needs of users and design for the good.
Public value
Lastly, Belmonte touched on public value and how services are measured. As we all know, keeping track of metrics is crucial when wanting to prove the success of a designed solution. However, she made a point that how services are measured does not always coincide with the way they’re experienced. Metrics come with constraints in which citizen’s perception cannot be fully represented. We should think about ways to observe factors such as emotions and inclusiveness, something that is an overlapping challenge between private and public sector.
Those are our key takeaways from Beatriz’s talk. If you would like to learn more about designing for policymaking feel free to reach out to her on LinkedIn.
The IBM Service Design Guild is greatly appreciative to host Beatriz Belmonte for her talk on Designing for Policymaking. Any questions or concerns regarding IBM’s Service Design Guild should be directed towards Tracy Geraldez at Tracy.Geraldez@ibm.com.
Special thanks to Chu-Yi Vuong for co-writing and editing this article and Danilo Lopes Parmegiani for helping with the banner.
Izzi Cain is a Service Designer for IBM Finance & Operations based in Chicago, IL. The above article is personal and does not necessarily represent IBM’s positions, strategies, or opinions.
