Design narratives for dinner
What if a dinner can weave connections and encourage peer sharing and learning? Understanding the design legacies in organisations as well as our personal journeys can help designers working in governments to reflect together.
This blog will share the concept behind Dinner & Stories — the official conference dinner at International Design in Government Conference 2024. The dinner concept has a foundation in Prof. Sabine Junginger’s academic work around design legacies and organisational design narratives (Junginger 2009, 2014, 2015, 2017). I have used this framework in my own research on the Finnish design in government and hosted another event with the concept at the Helsinki Design Week 2023.
Planning and organising a dinner
Dinners make a difference. Traditional set-ups of conferences and events usually choose a format of talks, panels or workshops. A dinner can offer a setting that helps people relax and connect in a different way. We had two long tables covered with brown paper for note taking, winter lights and autumn coloured leaves decorating the tabletops. Our menu was divided into welcome toast, starter, main course and dessert. Our food was all vegan and introduced “nyhtökaura” (pulled oats) as a Finnish no-meat innovation to our international guests. We wanted to keep the cost for participants low and managed to find a very affordable partner at Kipsari to arrange the catering and space — and manage the payments. It was not very fancy, but perhaps the cozyness of the scrappy details made everyone feel more relaxed. We even had many conference participants helping to set the tables and arrange the space. This further increased a sense of belonging and community. Dinner guests were grouped by AI into diverse small groups, numbered around the tables, with guest placecards set out. We had planned a switch of seats twice during the programme, to enable people to meet as many new people as possible.
Design for co-creation
We selected 3 perspectives that arranged our dinner discussions and introduced key concepts of Prof Junginger’s design narrative framework.
Origin stories
We started the dinner with a personal perspective: How did you get into design (in government)? Everyone has that starting point, first step, an ahaa-moment when they were first introduced to this context. Designers usually have very varied backgrounds and the origin stories show how there are a multitude of ways to get into this profession.
Origin stories are also connected to design narratives and design legacies because despite our personal first steps, there is always something that was there before us. Design has been taking place in organisations even before designers arrived — this can be called silent design or design legacy. It is the planning, making and shape-giving practices that exists everywhere. What is interesting to understand is how and why these practices came to be. And how each of us are coping with the pre-text of design in organisations. Design legacies can facilitate organisational learning, and help us capture the maturity of design through understanding its evolution in the organisation. Design legacies “form and inform current design practices and current design thinking”. (Junginger and Bailey, 2017)
Prompt 1 — visualise and note down your origin story on the table paper.
Positions
After some food and switching tables, we moved on to the second perspective on organisations: Where in the (governmental) organisational structure is design actually located or perceived to be located? How has this changed over time? Who are you collaborating with and how?
Positions matter because they draw the limits of our mandate and reach. Positions describe the maturity of design in our organisations. According to Prof Junginger’s “Four bubbles” model, we can identify patterns of design’s position in organisations.
Prof Junginger first published this model in their paper “Parts and wholes: places of design thinking in organizational life” in 2009. Since then, the model has been used in many places and variations (see figures below). During our dinner, Prof Junginger explained the model with Aalto chairs and paper circles and webs. The paper web reaching across the organisation seemed to capture the participants’ imagination and it was mentioned several times during the second conference day.
Prompt 2 — Use circles and arrows to draw your/design’s position in the (government) organisational structure on the table paper.
Timelines
For the dessert we had a third and final perspective of the national and international: What have been the steps and defining moments that have influenced the journey of design in government — how has design evolved in your country?
Mapping and reflecting on the journey of design in government for the past 10 years or so can reveal learnings that can be shared between countries and practitioners. Timelines can explain why design has evolved in a way it has.
Through my own research I used 4 categories to map out the journey of a design team in government. These included: events, key stages, outputs and projects, and outcomes describing maturity levels. Events describe the visible and tangible moments that made a difference. Key stages give a theme for each period of time during the journey. And outputs or projects are the examples of work during that stage. Outcomes are reflections of the maturity of each stage.
Building such a visual map can help a team and any “newcomers to understand why they are where they are and why they are doing things the way they are doing them — for now” (Junginger & Bailey, 2015, 7).
In the Dinner & Stories, we collected memories from the national journeys of design in government. The ideas was to then put these memories on a shared timeline to form an international shared journey.
Prompt 3 — Visualise and note down key step(s) from the 10 year journey of design in government in your country. Use the template provided and bring this note to our shared timeline on the wall.
The memories we collected from this part of the dinner represented moments such as:
- government plans and reports
- visiting projects in other countries
- getting a mentor
- launching teams and units
- seeing a talk, hosting a session at a conference
- having a personal realisation
- seeing a public design framework
- communities
References
Junginger, S. (2009). “Design in the Organization: Parts and Wholes”, Design Research Journal Vol. 2 (09): 23–28.
Junginger, S. (2014). “Design legacies: Why service designers are not able to embed design in the organization.” Proceedings of the fourth Service Design and Service Innovation Conference (ServDes.2014)
Junginger, S. (2015). “Organizational Design Legacies and Service Design”. The Design Journal Vol. 18 (02): 209–226.
Junginger, S. and Bailey, S. (2015). “Designing vs Designers: How organizational design narratives shift the focus from designers to designing”, in Designing for Service by Sangiorgi, D. and Prendiville, A. (2017).
Design Commission. (2013). Restarting Britain 2: Design and public services.
Thank you
Our Dinner & Stories team included Prof Sabine Junginger, Sofia Wasastjerna, Radhika Motani and Mariana Salgado. Thank you for helping to craft out this dinner concept and make the event special!
Thank you to the 110 conference participants that took part in this dinner.
Thank you Mariana Salgado for our years together reflecting on our experiences in designing in government. Many of this work is inspired by our duetto talk at the International Design in Government Conference 2019 in Edinburgh, Scotland.
About the writer
Anni Leppänen is the founder of Julkis-muotoilijat, Finnish government design community, and the Conference Chair for International Design in Government Conference 2024 in Helsinki, Finland.
CC BY 4.0
This dinner concept is under the license of CC BY 4.0. This does not apply to photos or academic papers cited.
