5 Tips to Move from Theory to Practice Using Design Lenses
This blog follows up on the event ‘Designing Transformation,’ a panel from the IIPP Forum 2024. You can watch the recording of the event above.
As a consultant for a think tank, my primary responsibility is to persuade policymakers to reconsider their approach to public digitalization. When I succeed in changing their perspective, the inevitable follow-up question I receive is: “OK, but how?”
Finding the best answer to this question is tremendously context-specific, and I sometimes feel that I fail to grasp the best reply. However, today I had the chance to attend the “Designing Transformation” panel at the IIPP Forum 2024, and I found some insights about how to bridge that gap between theory and practice. Here are my top 5:
1. Show, don’t tell
Anab Jain, co-founder and director of Superflux, shared a concrete example of working with the UAE government to shape their energy strategy until 2050. The challenge here was to bridge the gap between critical data about air pollution and promoting action. For Anab, “that is the space for imagination”.
Anab’s team created tangible, experiential artefacts to present ministers with polluted air samples from a projected future to demonstrate the urgency of investing in renewable energy. This tangible approach made the future consequences of current actions more real and pressing. As Anab Jain put it, “It’s not just about imagination at a conceptual level, but tangibly situating yourself in the future.”
Implementation Tip: Use speculative design to create experiential artefacts that help policymakers and stakeholders visualize the long-term impact of their decisions.
2. Mobilize the ecosystem
Sometimes, the best a policymaker can do is crowd in the ideas, capacity, and technical expertise needed to get things done. This was emphasized by Julie Hauer, Director of Sustainable and Circular Transition at the Danish Design Center, who highlighted the importance of mobilizing the ecosystem through participatory design.
Julie discussed an 8-year project aimed at transforming Denmark’s manufacturing industry through circular economy principles. This project involved creating governance frameworks that prioritize results over traditional organizational power dynamics. Since the goal was to impact the entire value chain, an ecosystemic approach was critical. In this context, creating safe spaces for experimentation allowed different stakeholders to collaborate without the fear of failure.
Implementation Tip: Establish participatory scaffolding in your projects. Create safe spaces for stakeholders to experiment and collaborate, fostering a culture where innovative solutions can emerge.
3. Bridge Product and System Dynamics
Some products excel at the user-product interaction level but fail when scaled to system dynamics. Dan Hill, Director of the Melbourne School of Design, used Uber as an example: “The interaction design of Uber is very, very good. The service design layer works well. But when you get to the city scale, it’s a disaster. Uber has increased congestion by as much as 50% in cities like San Francisco, which already had a congestion problem.”
In the public space, the opposite can also be true. A public policy might be solid at the system level but fail at the interaction level. To bridge these different levels at a city scale, building digital twins can be a valuable resource. Dan Hill applied this approach to the Victorian government in Australia, allowing policymakers to anticipate how changes in the urban landscape would affect micro-level interactions and vice-versa. For instance, they could predict how introducing a new shop might impact overall system dynamics.
Implementation Tip: When designing for large systemic changes, use your design lenses to adopt a user experience approach and consider micro-interactions. This increases the chances of last-mile adoption and acceptance of new policies.
4. Cultivate Dynamic Capabilities
As Rowan Conway, Policy Fellow and Visiting Professor of Strategic Design at IIPP, articulated in her opening remarks, “We need to flex some of the muscles that enable us to think differently.”
Dynamic capabilities are the skills and competencies that enable public organizations to learn, adapt, and reconfigure their key resources and processes in response to an evolving strategic environment. This involves adaptive learning, experimentation, and the ability to co-create with communities — skills that designers have mastered.
This approach encourages us to move beyond static, top-down learning methods and embrace a more fluid, learning-by-doing strategy to cultivate a responsive method of governance and learning. Dynamic capabilities allow for flexibility and adaptability in the face of complex challenges.
Implementation Tip: Treat each new project as an opportunity to build dynamic capabilities within your team and organization. Encourage adaptive learning, continuous experimentation, and co-creation with the communities you serve.
On a personal note, last year, while completing my MPA at IIPP, I took Rowan’s course “Transformation by Design.” During the course, she encouraged us to learn by doing and engage directly with our users. To better understand our design challenge, my friends Bruna (in the picture), Giulia, Aaron, and I attended a community hall in Camden, where we got to experience a concrete example of participatory design.
5. Be humble, work with others
Design can bring a lot to the table — new tools, frameworks, skills, strategies, and ways to interact with others. However, as with any other discipline, it needs to work collaboratively. During the Q&A session, Dan Hill emphasized this point, stating, “It’s just design. It’s no silver bullet”.
Dan explained that the role of the designer is often to integrate ideas, acting as a bridge between different disciplines. However, for design to be truly effective, designers need to work closely with other experts. This collaborative approach ensures that the best solutions are developed by leveraging the strengths of various fields.
Implementation Tip: Foster a collaborative environment where designers work alongside other experts. Embrace humility and recognize that integrating diverse perspectives leads to more robust and innovative solutions.
Conclusion
Design thinking is not about copy-pasting what industrial designers have learned and applying it indiscriminately to any context. Instead, it’s about incorporating some of their insights, tools, and frameworks to transform how we understand problem-solving. We don’t all need to become designers, but we can certainly borrow tools from their toolbox.
As a personal experiment, I’ll start changing the way I reply to government officials when asked, “OK, but how?”. By incorporating a blend of imagination, participatory culture, systemic thinking, design integration, and learning-by-doing, I hope to make the transition from theory to practice more tangible and effective.
