Designing policy network. What’s in a name?
Today we officially open our network to the world. Exactly six months ago, ten human beings and also PhD candidates in design (in the field of policy) met for the first time. While, following our personal quest in the -sometimes- lonely doctorate path, we felt the need to connect; and through Verena and Pamela’s initiative we came together to start building what we call today the Designing Policy Network: Research and Practice on Design in Policymaking.
In the growing research field of “design for policy”, dedicated investigations are still pioneering in isolation. While our studies advance, we keep finding new questions, not easily solved with the resources of our surroundings. The links are missing. Despite the abundance of communication channels, we are not as connected as we could be. The opportunity of meeting people with similar interrogations allowed us to start a conversation about “design” and “policy” and we would like to spread the word.
When we met we agreed on our desire to create a community, to build knowledge together, as well as to share questions and findings. In order to give shape to this community we started by deciding on a name that could represent our intentions. It was not a simple task. We not only had to face our different perspectives, but also a lack of clarity of the variety of concepts that are proliferating in this new field where “design” and “policy” are coming together.
Many names for the network emerged in our brainstorming: design & policy; designing policy research, designing policy, policy design…The discourse on the naming, also resulted in surfacing and clarifying the objectives of the network itself: 1) meet in the intersection of design and policy; 2) include practitioners, scholars and all those people interested in the field; 3) be inclusive and welcoming: a conversation among design and others disciplines traditionally dealing with policy (e.g., political sciences, public administration and policy sciences), but also other epistemic and practice-based communities; 4) advocate for design as an activity and not only a static outcome; 5) Emphasize our interest in an inclusive and constructive space for conversation among diverse disciplines.
This brainstorming originated the initial input to write our manifesto. We still consider it a work in progress open to anyone interested in contributing. We are giving life to it and sharing this manifesto draft to you in order to keep building and adapting it together. Today, we invite you to join this conversation. We have already some open questions emerging from this exercise: is policy already a design with -some or little- designing? Would it be possible to define policy design including the design field perspective? How different disciplinary perspectives define “design” and “designing”? We could continue writing an extensive list of questions ourselves. However, we would like to invite you to also pose your own questions. We are looking forward to this being the beginning of an engaging conversation.
We are looking forward to hearing from you!
Warm wishes from:
Ahmee Kim
Diana Pamela Villa Alvarez
Federico Vaz
Francesco Leoni
John Herniman
Luis García
Sofia Bosch Gómez
Verena Kontschieder
If you want to know more and comment, give a look to:
DPN website
Twitter
ResearchGate
Linkedin
If you would like to contribute writing articles or become an active member of the network, drop us a line
