PSI: a win-win team game
it’s all about collaboration!
“In the design field, if I look at designers and especially at the future generation, it seems to me that there is an increased awareness that societies are organized in a fairly unsustainable manner. There is a general growing desire to get involved: it looks to me that more and more designers want to become sort of active in social conversations, will that is pushing the design community to take an active role in the system. Something that, if I look back to 20 years ago, I didn’t see that much.” — Marco Steinberg, SNOWCONE & HAYSTACK
Public sector innovation can be compared to a team game. But, in this specific case, the different squads have to team up together in order to win the competition. In particular, if we consider the collaboration between the service design discipline and the public sector, we can observe how the whole system is based on a win-win strategy.
“In game theory, a win-win game is a game which is designed in a way that all participants can profit from it in one way or the other. (…) In the real world, a win-win strategy is often found in diplomacy and business, often in the form of a contract or written agreement. It’s a deal where both sides win.”
Literally, both sides win.
The public sector wins a lot! We already saw how service design can bring novelty, change, methods, tools, knowledge, creativity and rebuild trust towards citizens within the system. Additionally, it can help reduce costs in the long term, due to the improvement of services’ efficiency and better-targeted interventions in government issues. But designers are not superheroes of course, and as we said the innovation is a team play! So.. what does service design gains as well from this collaboration? Which are the main opportunities approaching this “new” field?
I found analyzing this aspect very interesting since is partly the same reason why I’m here writing and working for this topic!
Historically speaking — quoting the words of Stéphane Vincent and Romain Thévenet — “a socially-anchored design approach dates back to pioneers like the Austrian-American designer Viktor Papanek (1927–1999), who stressed the importance of designers’ societal responsibility and strongly pushed in favour of sustainable design, not for an elite, but for people with real needs.”
Those first interventions were mainly product-oriented but, years later — as Angelica Quicksey wrote in her inspiring article — “service design research and practice began finding its way into service delivery in the UK public sector in the early 2000’s, potentially stimulated by new labour policies on public engagement and user-centred public service reform that encouraged British design agencies to take on public service projects. Around the same time, Denmark launched its Mindlab, a cross-disciplinary team of designers, sociologists, and researchers tasked with bringing a citizen-driven approach to ministry-initiated projects.”
This was just the beginning of a series of pioneer projects linked to the public sphere. Then, going back to our team game metaphor, where and which are the opportunities for designers?
The service design “squad” is multidisciplinary in its roots, something that encourages it to always look for new challenges and unexplored ground. So, being an emerging field, the PSI embodies the perfect space for experimentations and innovation, as well as a hub to develop different and interesting projects.
Additionally, the learning part mentioned before is not just one way: the service design learns as well working together with the public sector. It can improve and acquire new skills and capabilities and, most of all, it practically understands how to deal with complexity. In fact, developing proposals for the public field is usually way more difficult than working with privates, particularly because of the multitude of actors, barriers and uncertainties linked to the system. In the other hand, it’s also true that this kind of projects — if they actually work out — despite the complexity reaches a larger audience, something that allows service designers to experience a bigger impact.
Last but not least, working with and within the public sector answers the “mantra” of the discipline: working for and with the users, delivering services that are completely user-focused and answer real needs.
To conclude this PSJ’s story, I want to share these few lines written by Andrew Polaine, Lavrans Løvlie, and Ben Reason in the 9th chapter of Service Design: From Insight to Implementation.
“From the outset, our ambition as service designers was to work with public services. Initially, this was because we felt we should not ignore such a large segment of the market. As we have learned more about public services, we have teamed up with a number of other designers and design advocates who see a role for service design in addressing key issues that public services face.
(…)The issues that service design uncovers and the solutions that it offers involve significant change management on organizational as well as political and cultural levels, and it is important that we work with professionals in those areas, as well as policy makers and advisors, to make sure the change actually happens. These kinds of partnerships only work when there is a climate of professional humility on all sides.”
.a big thank you to Marco Steinberg, for our illuminating interview.
.a list of interesting readings if you want to know more about the topic:
Service Design for Public Policy,
Service design: from insight to implementation,
Designing citizen-centred public services by Service Design Network
